Recent content by zakael19

In 4e with no expertise, Rogues were good in combat - but also deployed a nice variety of skills for skill challenge approach variability. With expertise in 5e, as noted above that totally breaks math - either you have goofy DCs that only apply to expertise classes and are impossible for...

Something I love about Arcana is that they enhance the richness and mystery of the world (one of the key components of the GM agenda: "Portray a rich and mysterious world) by both their description and the steps you need to take to unlock and then further use them. These aren't magic items you...

Can we get a similar note over in the Millennial thread, which opened up with generational stereotypes which are widely known in data to be inaccurate at best and false or misleading at worst? Or are us younger folk just more worthy of being mocked?

LOTR Online has a fantastic Shire starting area that's super thematic and a joy to play through, but has a much better premise (and is about external forces moving within the shire slowly trying to filter darkness in). Sounds like something along those lines would've been a more interesting spin!

Echo chamber here, establish a social contract in session 0 about pursuing the adventure. Bury the rails a bit if you feel the need too, my favorite way of doing that is to try and work appropriate triggers into PC's motivations by discussing character concepts and shaping them a bit (eg: if a...

I would love to see WOTC design a tutorial the way FU has done, where you match piecemeal mechanics into game action scene by scene. I think you could do that, but I also think you'd start to ask some questions about certain design decisions. I just took a look at the PF2 Beginner's Box, which...

Almost none of these games have a genuine tutorial either, the way pretty much every video game does when systems are this complex (not that there's uniform quality there). I just ran the Fabula Ultima "Press Start" tutorial mission for one of my usual groups of fairly new players, and the way...

I think you can have the style of play with or without whatever we choose to define in our heads as full “OC” engagement. Concede the potential for tragic / bad outcome arcs being a goal of play, just not what comes to mind or what I’ve seen in my play so I didn’t think of it!

Failure, setback, or betrayal - things that went wrong that establish why you're out striving with awesome hooks.

I think there’s something to be said for having characters have a reason to a) bite the premise together and b) knit into a party to the get the ball rolling. FU does this explicitly during party creation - you establish bonds and reasons to be an adventuring party as part of premise (and bonds...

It has a very different model of conflict and motivations that may be better suited for what i think characterizes this style of play then core AW. DW/Fellowship or other PBTA drifts may be better suited still.

Idk if this really is in response to your post, but just kinda sharing why what I think the play and GM style that aligns with whatever the heck neotrad is just works for me: So I have nowhere the gaming history most posters here do. Played a tiny bit of 3.5 as a teen ages ago, and then nothing...

My prep for my 3 hour 5e game last night was 15 minutes of sketching out a notional floorplan for a townhouse and a couple notable things in rooms, a quick list of significant NPCs at the party with a couple quirks; and probably another 15-20 minutes of finding some damn maps for my VTT in case...

Why the hostility? Good god. “Story now” narrativism is maybe not one the styles of play in the blog post, but it’s the entire style of play the Forge games (AW) were created to promote. It resists the concept of a character arc / actualized backstory beyond how any of those things apply to the...

It’s static though - you can’t have double advantage or double disadvantage. So there’s a finite limit to teamwork. It’s simple to comprehend and elegant but doesn’t have complexity. Eg: a rogue can now grant themselves advantage at will as long as they don’t move. What purpose teamwork and...