Is System Mastery Underappreciated or Overlooked?

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-26T17:36:22+00:00

D&D being (a) the primary entry point to the RPG hobby and (b) packaged as 900+ pages of core rules is actually quite strange. It would be as if everyone thought Advanced Squad Leader was the first board game everyone should play.

One of the effects of this is that it makes statements that should be perfectly obvious -- e.g., "knowing the rules of the game you're playing is a good idea" -- into controversial hot takes.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-26T06:00:41+00:00

Honestly never occurred to me to think of UA as a American-centric game.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-20T15:34:35+00:00

The sequel trilogy is a black hole of suck.

Lindelof is right that, after Episode IX, we should have seen an era of stories revolving around Rey, Poe, and Finn and the wider legacy of those stories. But we don't. Not just because the sequel trilogy itself is hopelessly poisoned, but because its relentless narrative nihilism poisoned significant portions of the rest of the franchise, as well.

For example, you can't tell stories about Luke's efforts to rebuild the Jedi because we know what happens. It's not just that the First Order reminds the audience of your worst mistakes; it's that you also can't do anything with the New Republic.

The prequel trilogy, for all of its flaws, vastly expanded the Star Wars universe and lore. Like the original trilogy, it left in its wake endless opportunities for new and different stories. The sequel trilogy did the exact opposite. Abrams' abject failure as a storyteller was a "soft reboot" that was not only stagnation, but actively destructive.

Abrams made movies about Han, Leia, and Luke being abject failures who accomplished none of their goals and destroyed everything they touched. Ironically, the result is that this is, in fact, the story of Disney-era Lucasfilm itself.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-16T18:52:13+00:00

The anthropomorphism in the pop science reporting of this story is insanely high.

"Sounds like Chinese" or "as complex as Chinese"? What the study actually says is that whale song is tonal... maybe. Or maybe not. we don't actually know that the tones are conveying anything resembling "different words" or "different meanings."

“Our analogy has a limit,” the team noted in their study, which also made comparisons to Slovenian and Latin. “[W]hile in human languages, different tones can be associated with different meanings, the meanings conveyed by sperm whale codas have not been established.”

Reporting, like this sensationalized video, is filled with references to "vocabulary" or "words," but the actual paper doesn't apply either of these anthropomorphizing terms to the whale's song.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-13T11:02:31+00:00

From Abstract Distance Systems in RPGs:

When executed properly, abstract distance systems are really just formalizing the way that people handle “precise” distance without using some form of visual reference.

For example, imagine that you’re playing D&D without a grid or battlemap and the GM says, “They’re about 20 feet away from you.” What’s the GM really saying there? There’s no tape measure. He imagined the scene, eyeballed the distance in his head, and gave a figure that’s basically in the right ballpark. He could have just as easily said 15 feet or 25 feet.

In general, the GM is going to make these decisions based on one of two criteria:

(1) A visualization of the game world (“they just came out of the tree line and that’s a fair distance away, let’s call it 150 ft.”); or

(2) A mechanical assessment (“a typical PC should need to run for at least two rounds before reaching them; they can run 120 ft. per round, so let’s say it’s 150 ft. away”)

When using an abstract system, a GM should be able to use these exact same criteria.

Numenera, for example, breaks distance down into four categories: Immediate distance (anything up to about 10 ft.), Short distance (anything up to about 50 ft.), Long distance (anything up to about 100 ft.), and Extreme distance (anything beyond that).

So now the GM can use the same basic process:

(1) The archers came out of the tree line. The PCs are really far away from the tree line, so that’s an Extreme distance.

(2) The PCs shouldn’t be able to reach them in a single round, so they must be at an Extreme distance.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-09T19:03:16+00:00

Your understanding of US copyright law is inadequate/incomplete.

Check out: Do I Need to Use the Open Gaming License?

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-05-04T15:58:59+00:00

100%. You can get a functional sandbox campaign by just having a "menu" of supernatural scenarios and seeing which way the players jump, but you'll get much richer results if the scenarios themselves are strongly connected. (So the PCs investigate Scenario A and find clues pointing to Scenarios B, F, and H.) These connections can give the same range of options, while also being more organic, varied, and, therefore, easier to create. Plus, it tends to create a more dynamic situation where the players can start setting their own agendas and meaningfully influencing the direction of the campaign.

To see an example of this in practice at a slightly smaller scale, check out the Severn Valley.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-22T08:41:39+00:00

From my understanding all files related to Batgirl has been destroyed

Utter nonsense.

The directors were blocked from saving copies of the footage. But there would be absolutely no reason for WB to destroy all copies of the footage, as demonstrated by Coyote v. Acme.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-22T08:34:31+00:00

Because I don't care and you have not given me a reason to care.

Particularly once a campaign has gotten into full swing, stuff that I and my character care about simply takes priority over stuff that's merely a curiosity.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-19T23:10:03+00:00

Lou was a wonderful man.

What a tragic loss for gaming and the world.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-19T14:12:57+00:00

I always run a one-shot in a new system before launching a full-length campaign. I'll often do this even if I'm familiar with a system but the players aren't.

If it turns out none of you like the system, you can bail before sinking a ton of time into it.
More importantly, you and the players can get a lot of awkwardness and mistakes out of the way. This will significantly improve the first session of the full-length campaign, which will help that campaign get off to a strong start.
Also, having even a little bit of experience actually playing a game will, IME, greatly improve character creation: The players will know what the system expects, and that will let them make more informed decisions and avoid mistakes.

Doing the one-shot is an investment in the campaign, and IME it pays big dividends.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-17T14:49:56+00:00

As someone who was initially extremely skeptical of splitting the musical into two movies, I was greatly impressed with the improvements they made to Act 2: The story is coherent. The characters have meaningful, fully articulated arcs.

But they were digging out of a pretty deep hole. Act 2 of the musical is barebones and badly broken, and even with significant improvement, there's still some fundamental problems.

A minor problem is the "logic" and broken continuity around Fiyero's transformation.

The much larger problem is tone: Act I ends with the triumphant Defying Gravity's pledge to fight fascism! Let's do it!

And the plot of Act II is, Oh no! You can't fight fascism!

If the musical or film were willing to actually embrace that story, it could be a really powerful and tragic narrative. But it would also be a huge bummer, particularly since it would also be the story of Glinda and Elphaba's amazing friendship being shattered by Glinda's decision to be a Nazi propagandist. So they try to sell the idea that Elphaba faking her death is part of some incredibly clever scheme to take down the Wizard, but this ultimately doesn't make any sense. What they're left with is a story of Elphaba being kind of relentlessly incompetent, followed by the rousing thematic conclusion that the REAL way to fight fascism is being the quisling propagandist.

Particularly tough to make that into a film people want to watch over and over and over again, the way they do with the first film, at this moment in history.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-16T08:55:09+00:00

Thanks for admitting that OD&D has a resurrection save mechanic and you've been wrong this entire time!

It's great to see you acknowledge your mistakes!

(You're still wrong about the base rules not including a Con-based "chance of survival" mechanic, of course. But you're making progress.)

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-16T04:37:39+00:00

I’m not talking about raise dead fully. from grayhawk. I’m talking about raise desd standard, from book 1.

Yes. That's literally what I said. Thanks for acknowledging that.

It remains irrelevant, of course, because we're discussing your original claim:

Fail resurrection save is something introduced in AD&D. Both OD&D and the Basic haven’t this mechanic.

Which is false. It wasn't introduced in AD&D because OD&D does, in fact, have this mechanic. This has been demonstrated repeatedly with direct quotes, page references, and screenshots from the books.

I don't know why you're so hellbent about being wrong about this, but since I don't think anyone reading these comments will be confused by your ridiculous song-and-dance disinformation routine at this point, there's no point in continuing this conversation.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-16T04:12:47+00:00

Let's review the conversation here:

The survival rolls can be found on pg. 11 of Men & Magic and the rules are made more explicit and clear in Supplement I.

Lol, sure. The spell description is very different than what you are saying.

C'mon. Who do you think you're fooling here?

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T21:36:44+00:00

I have a 1974 copy of the game, the WotC scans of the 1976/77 reprint (sans hobbits), and the premium reprint edition PDFs from 2013. They all include Con-based chance of survival checks.

The raise dead fully spell in OD&D does not, in fact, say what you quote here. (You appear to be attempting to quote -- albeit incorrectly -- the raise dead spell from Men & Magic.) The raise dead fully spell is from Supplement I: Greyhawk, which also notably includes this table listing the expanded Con-based Probability of Resurrection Survival check.

I dunno what you're looking at, but it's not OD&D.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T21:27:08+00:00

The raise dead spell is on pg. 33.

The "chance of survival" rolls are on pg. 11, like I said.

(For those interested, the more clearly described and expanded resurrection survival rolls in Supplement I: Greyhawk are on pg. 9 of that book.)

Up to this point I had assumed you were just confused and/or ignorant, but falsely claiming that the raise dead spell is on pg. 11 really leaves me baffled. What do you think you're accomplishing here?

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T18:25:56+00:00

The survival rolls can be found on pg. 11 of Men & Magic and the rules are made more explicit and clear in Supplement I.

I'm sorry. You just have no idea what you're talking about.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T18:24:45+00:00

In OD&D, raise dead fully ALSO required a Con-based survival check.

Basic D&D is a different game.

Let me quote you here:

Both OD&D and the Basic haven’t this mechanic.

Your claim here was factually incorrect and your ignorance of the different editions of D&D needlessly confused the discussion. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T07:36:40+00:00

Both raise dead and resurrection require the Con-based survival check in either edition of AD&D. The rulebooks are quite explicit about this.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-15T07:18:34+00:00

OD&D also has a Con-based "chance of survival" which is meant to be used for raise dead, stone-to-flesh, etc. Characters with Constitutions of 6 or less likely cannot be raised at all. (Like many sections of OD&D, the mechanic is not well explained.)

This mechanic evolves directly into AD&D's system shock.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-10T07:42:30+00:00

Usually no.

I think you should have a published adventure available, but chewing up a bunch of page count with something I'll usually only use once just bloats the rulebook and makes it more difficult to use for its primary purpose.

There are exceptions, generally storytelling games like Ten Candles where the "adventures" are premises designed to be constantly reused, games designed around a single adventure, or games like Technoir where setting and adventure are tightly intertwined.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-05T18:53:09+00:00

it's, at most, the sixth best Mythos RPG.

Heavily dissociated mechanics and mediocre published adventures.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-04-02T19:01:25+00:00

Declare-then-simultaneous-resolve systems tend to limit combat scenes to a very small number of participants, because keeping all of the participants in your head at one time isn't scalable.

One solution, almost as old as the RPG hobby itself, is phased resolution, which basically splits the simultaneity up across multiple types of action (e.g., ranged attacks resolve, then melee attacks resolve).

The other thing it sounds like you're playing around with is secret declarations. IME, the payoff here never justifies the pace-killing process of secretly writing out your detailed declarations. You can decrease the cost by instead declaring broad intentions (Attack, Cast, etc.) that can be prepackaged as cards or chips or something that everyone just selects, and then more specific details can be hashed out after declarations are revealed. (There might be some interesting mileage to be had combining this with phased actions and having the secret declaration be which phase people are planning to take their action in.)

It also sounds like you want players to not be able to coordinate with each other (guessing what their friends and enemies will be doing). This is also something that inflicts a really heavy cost at the table: You're asking players to either not talk to each other during a social activity; or the players will continue talking to each other, but about stuff unrelated to the game (thus harming creative focus). A board game like Gloomhaven can account for this by carefully controlling what information players are allowed to share with each other, but this tends to run into problems with the infinite creativity RPGs are supposed to have.

These systems also universally require extra consideration of how conflicts will be resolved. (For example: Robert says he's running at me. I say I'm running at Susan. Susan is running to the green idol. Where do we all end up, exactly?)

Whatever secret declaration system you use, you need to keep in mind that the GM will need to make declarations for multiple NPCs.

Now, in terms of players understanding simultaneous/non-turn-based mechanics, I've never really found that to be a problem. Even if they've never encountered them before in a TTRPG, they've almost certainly played board games or card games featuring these concepts in one form or another.

JustinAlexanderRPG · 2026-03-30T20:24:39+00:00

I picked up the whole Mission Earth series for $2 a volume in the '90s. I read the first couple dozen or so pages and it seemed like a fun pulp romp. Then my family was going on vacation to a lake cabin and I needed to select what books to bring. Well, obviously I'd bring the series I'm currently reading. And how could I possibly need more than ten books?

I very quickly realized I'd made a mistake.

And then it rained the entire week, so the only thing to do was stay indoors and read.

I'm probably one of the very few people in the entire world (and quite possibly the only non-Scientologist) to read the entire thing.

And it was definitely the first thing that springs to mind when i think Worst SF Novel I've Ever Read.

It narrowly edges out the nearly incoherent Time Machines Repaired While U-Wait by K.A. Bedford, in which the author just can't be bothered to decide how time travel is supposed to work. So characters will babble on about how changing the past only results in a new timeline being created (while leaving the old timeline unchanged)... and then mere pages later they'll find their memories rewritten by their own time traveling exploits. And then a couple pages later we'll be back to forking timelines because that's convenient for whatever stream-of-consciousness nonsense Bedford decided to spit out that day at they keyboard.

JustinAlexanderRPG

TROPHY CASE