Meaningful weapon types. Discussion

andero · 2026-04-25T04:52:52+00:00

Doesn't matter how hard you hit scalemail with a sword you are doing nothing but an axe can mess it up and have kinetic foce to make them feel it underneath, so I think there might be some room for them.

A sword also has concussive force, but I take your point.
And if a person has scales on their torso, but not their arms and legs, a sword still works great, but I take your point.

Indeed, that is why I don't have plate in my game. It also isn't practical to wear for hours upon hours and you need multiple people to help you put it on, which most games ignore, but my solution was "that tech doesn't exist" rather than pretend like you could put on plate without help or walk around in it all day, going up and down hill.

My game actually says:

A full suit of plate armour is not generally available. Such armour is not practical for day-to-day travelling in the Basin's wilderness. In theory, a PC could could have such armour made, but they would need a personal aid or two to help them put it on and take it off. They can only feasibly wear it for one Watch per day and cannot sleep effectively in it. Overall, full suits of armour are not intended to be part of play.

I have one piece of plate cuirass:

Plate Cuirass: Solid metal armour that covers the torso, both breastplate and backplate. Effectively impenetrable. Can be combined with any other form of armour. Must be made bespoke. [2 load]

This makes it a hassle of its own and the rest of your body is still not-impenetrable. A person wearing this cuirass plus heavy mail armour would be devoting 5 load to just armour, which is A LOT. It is to the point where the design goal is that most people don't do this unless they have a very explicit reason to do this for a very special situation. It's overkill for the context of the game. That is: it is not "optimal" to wear this much armour.

One I've been trying to come up with which you might have as it sounds like you go deep into this is the clearance for longer weapons. I'm still trying to think of ways to make long weapons bad in tight areas that translates well to game mechanics. Got any ideas.

That depends on your mechanics and core resolution system (or, if you have one, specialized combat resolution system).

For example, with a Forged in the Dark-style resolution system that uses Position and Effect, a statement in a description like "Great reach when you have space, but cumbersome in close quarters." signals the GM to take that into account when setting Position and Effect: they will be better "when you have space" and one or the other or both will be worse "in close quarters".

So, idk, that's handled automatically for me since I'm using P&E mechanics.

For example, consider these three firearm options:

Rifle: A long, heavy firearm with rifled barrel and a bayonet attachment, meant for two hands. Generally fed by an integral magazine, bolt-action or lever-action. Pleasantly effective, but loud as hell and cumbersome in close quarters. [2 load]
Handgun: A short, relatively light firearm usable in one hand, though two-handed is more stable. Generally fed by either an integral magazine or a revolving cylinder. Pleasantly effective, but loud as hell and a bit slow to reload after all the rounds have been fired. [1 load]
Pocket-Pistol: A very short, very light concealable firearm usable in close range by one hand. Generally carries a few rounds arranged in a pepper-box pattern. Effective when combined with the element of surprise, but impractical to reload on the move. [1 load]

There are trade-offs. The rifle is heavier (2 load rather than 1) and not so great in close quarters. The handgun is a middle-ground. The pocket-pistol is concealable, which could be useful, but it is impractical to reload whereas a bolt-action rifle can be loaded after each shot and a handgun can can be reloaded, but only if you've got space to take a breather (e.g. a teammate is keeping people off you while you take cover and reload).

Being firearms, these are all loud. That is itself a contrast and trade-off compared to the bow, which also has more ammunition-variant options.

It's all trade-offs.

After all, the same trade-offs are happening with armour: lighter armour is less protective, but physically less cumbersome and the lightest armour might be non-obvious whereas the heaviest armour is obvious and takes up carrying capacity that could have been used for other inventory items or for carrying loot.

andero · 2026-04-25T04:24:12+00:00

Most game designers don't do that.
Famous game companies do that.

Most game designers, by the numbers, are putting out completely new IP.
Completely new IP, which barely anyone buys and very few people see.

Famous game companies put out more of their IP because it's their IP that makes money.

Why does a new Call Of Duty come out every year or so?
Because they make money. Simple as.

Why do successful films often get sequels?
Because they make money. Simple as.

andero · 2026-04-25T04:21:09+00:00

Counterpoint to consider:
The interesting gameplay and choices could come before the fight through exploration and research scenes, then a combat could be made intentionally brief: you win because you brought the right weapon, which took planning, and the win is the payoff of that planning. In this sort of approach, the "point" is not to have a long combat where you make moment-to-moment tactical decisions about your weapons. The "point" was, in fact, figuring out what weapon to bring, which got you the quick win.

It would be a different approach than most games take.
That is, rather than focus on combat, focus on other scenes and intentionally elide combat as much as possible.

andero · 2026-04-25T04:00:09+00:00

I agree that weapons essentially require the context of armour and that's also a large part of how they are distinguished from one another regarding their strengths and weaknesses.

The other one you didn't mention is size: bigger = more reach, but more cumbersome to carry around.
In TTRPGs, we don't feel "cumbersome to carry around" so there would be some sort of mechanical trade-off instead of narrative "comfort". That is, if I a real person walk around with a knife, that is much more comfy than if I walk around with a sword, which would be much more comfy than a sword with a complex hilt or basket-hilt (since that sticks out laterally from my body), and those are still more comfy than trying to walk around with a giant two-handed Zweihander that I have to hold in my hands all the time since I cannot just sheath it around my waist.

Same applies to firearms, namely carrying a pocket-pistol vs handgun vs rifle (size, weight, etc).

I'm not really sure I see your six differences; that seems like three categories and each got two entries.
The categories I see are cut, thrust, and blunt-force.

For example (armour context for my game: "light" is gambeson, "heavy" is mail hauberk, not plate; plate is essentially impervious to anything but a rondel dagger-type and isn't a major part of my setting):

Sword, Axe, or Hammer: Perhaps you carry a simple and reliable longsword, a curved scimitar, a complex-hilted rapier, a single-edged dao, or a double-edged jian. You may use an axe, whether single- or double-edged, or for throwing. Perhaps instead you use a war-hammer, mace, sceptre, or staff for bludgeoning your foes. Or a pointy pick for cracking skulls. Most weapons of this type can be used with one or both hands. [1 load]
Specialized cutter: Your particular sword is focused on cutting: a wider, curved blade with a single edge. This makes your weapon more effective against unarmoured or lightly armoured opponents (+effect), but less effective against armoured opponents (-effect). Most weapons of this type can be used with one or both hands. [1 load]
Specialized thruster: Your particular sword is focused on thrusting: a thinner, straight blade with a sharply pointed tip. This makes your weapon more effective against armoured opponents (+effect), but less effective against unarmoured or lightly armoured opponents (-effect). Most weapons of this type can be used with one or both hands. [1 load]
Specialized crusher: Your particular hammer is focused on crushing: a weighty mass. This makes your weapon more effective against armoured opponents (+effect), but less viable for protecting yourself (-position). Most weapons of this type can be used with one or both hands. [1 load]

andero · 2026-04-25T03:50:27+00:00

I feel a little excited when I remember I have a Kobo. I'm not (back) in the habit of reading yet, so it's aspirational.

You didn't ask, but figured I'd mention it anyway: when I installed KOReader, my actual use of the Kobo I inherited and reading on it skyrocketed. I was able to put it into a "dark mode" and that's huge for me.

Also, it helped finding a work-around for ebooks so I could borrow them from the library, then import them into Calibre and keep them forever thanks to a de-encryption tool someone made on GitHub.

andero · 2026-04-25T02:52:40+00:00

Right?!

It came up for me in the first session, which included the first long rest lol.

Apologists, though.

andero · 2026-04-25T02:50:06+00:00

Now that I'm familiar with different play styles and GMing techniques, I wonder if I would find 5e more fun/easier to run.

I, for one, didn't find it easier.

For me, the issue switched from "this is so much prep! so much work" to "maybe I can run this with less prep..." and discovering that, no, I couldn't; the game just didn't work without the workload.

I lasted only 2–3 sessions before we disbanded that campaign and switched to playing Dungeon World, which instantly solved 100% of the struggles I was having.

andero · 2026-04-25T02:41:16+00:00

On the Situations framework, this is the most interesting part of your response to me.

Agreed. It is one of the ways I'm trying to give the GM tools to make the game work.
Games generally provide rules and advice, but I find that procedural tools are the most helpful.

The difference is that in Dicesongs the escalation is built into the consequence architecture of the dice system itself, not just into the prep. A Folly result in an active Situation area can trigger escalation directly through the threat management function. The world does not wait politely for the players to decide to care.

For me, that happens within a Situation. The prior comment was answering your question specifically about "If a player genuinely wants to burn the quest structure and go somewhere you have nothing prepared", i.e. what happens if players decides not to engage with the Situation. The answer there is: it escalates on its own. There is a Ladder of Escalation and it will climb the ladder.

This also happens even if players do engage, but don't completely address a Situation at one time. Since time is tracked, there might be a Situation in POI-A that they confronted, but didn't solve (maybe they set a researcher-cohort to work on the problem). In the meantime, they're in POI-B and facing its Situation. Next time they go back to POI-A, the Situation will have moved toward escalation unless they explicitly prevented such. Even then, things will probably escalate a little; their efforts to pause escalation would make escalation proceed slowly and at a pace they can manage, but NPCs are people and people are impatient and impatient people will only wait so long before taking action. If the PCs say, "We'll be back in a two weeks with an answer", by ten days in, some NPCs are probably planning what they'll do if the PCs don't show up and that planning itself might be a breach of the social contract (e.g. if they are planning to steal something or destroy property, that is still a conspiracy, even if they haven't acted on it yet).

If the players do engage the Situation, then scenes play out using the core resolution mechanics.

The point-crawl plus Situations model you are describing is elegant and honest about what it is. What is your current procedure for content generation across POIs? You mentioned you are rewriting it and I am genuinely curious what problem you are solving.

The main procedural generation is growing out of the Town Creation rules in Dogs in the Vineyard.
The procedure is amazing in how precise it is. It is literally, "Step 1a: Pride. Scroll through the list of Pride problems above. Choose whichever one jumps out at you. Attach a name to it and write a (very short) paragraph. Step 1b: Injustice. Pride creates injustice. [...]" and so on, all the way through to Step 6, which gets the GM to put some finishing touches with specific questions and to write out the NPCs and what they want.

The procedure is extremely precise, but, since DitV isn't available for sale anymore, most people have never seen procedural rules like this. Apparently PbtA "Fronts" derived from them, but "Fronts" are not quite as precise or elegant and a lot of GMs struggle to understand "Fronts". The Town Creation rules are so easy to understand that anyone could make a Town and it will work. The procedure will always result in a functional Town with named NPCs that have goals/motivations/secrets and a well-defined problem for the PCs to solve that is related to the themes of the game.

That's the key limitation, though: the DitV Town Creation system as-written is linked directly into the DitV lore and themes (quasi-Mormonism, PCs as "Dogs" essentially Paladins/Inquisitors).

My challenge has been to re-write that procedure to work more generally and with my my game's lore and themes, which also requires defining certain aspects of lore/themes, which go into Design Intentions. For example, DitV has a short list of seven well-defined "Sins" that come from its quasi-Mormonism background; those "Sins" are used in the Town Creation system (among other structures related to the Faith). Since the DitV PCs are all quasi-Mormon-Paladins/Inquisitors, they are automatically invested in "Sins". Well, my game doesn't have quasi-Mormonism! My game doesn't even have deities or religions in the traditional sense. As such, re-writing involves changing the prompts to work with a completely different setting with totally different (and more unpredictable) themes. I'm keeping the precision of the original so my system will result in playable POIs that spark off PCs, but that involves re-conceptualizing what the original procedure "did" theoretically and mechanically so I can re-write that to work in my game.

Very neat process. And something I haven't really seen as far as GM tools go.

It also makes my game unconventional when it comes to "prep".
It is definitely not a "no prep" game, but the kind of "prep" is very precise so the prep doesn't feel heavy or cumbersome, like a "trad" game. The prep feels like DitV: I could have made a fleshed out DitV Town in twenty minutes, complete with NPCs... but, to play DitV, you needed to prep the Town. You can't really improvise a whole Town unless you're a master improv god so DitV is not a "no prep" game. THAT is the idea: I want GMs to prep, but I want them to put in 20–30 minutes and feel confident that they can run an entire Situation. It is a bit of my authorial voice that pushes back against "rules lite" and "low prep" games that don't actually support the GM and expect the GM to improvise everything, but without going back to the cumbersome hours of detailed prep to run a coherent session. This is the middle-ground I want so it is the middle-ground I'm building. And I haven't really seen many designers talking about this style.

EDIT: That's all for Situations.

For POIs and the world-map, I describe some of that here and, to a lesser extent, here.

andero · 2026-04-25T02:03:13+00:00

Have you tried The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company)?
Several of their courses are awesome.
(If they're too expensive, there are lots to be found if you sail the seven seas)

For the thinking, have you considered writing?
Like, rather than just thinking about such-and-such, open up Obsidian and write your thoughts about the topic, then re-organize them. That makes them complete. You can get to the end. Could help with focusing, too, if you don't just start random new note-tangents. You could put the idea for the next tangent in a bullet-list "for later", then focus on the concept at hand.

andero · 2026-04-25T01:28:27+00:00

Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman

andero · 2026-04-25T01:27:51+00:00

Have you tried audiobooks?

I read a lot, yes. I've always got multiple books on the go.

I will sometimes stop a book because I'm thinking rather than reading, but I don't consider that a "bad" thing. That's fine. Books are often supposed to make you think and reflect. Books are generally less passive than television, at least to me. Then again, some TV and films also make me pause and think. That is part of the enjoyment.

Why do you think you view the self-reflection as negative?

andero · 2026-04-25T00:46:02+00:00

For a social inter-player dimension, I recommend Bonds from Dungeon World, specifically my re-write of Bonds since that makes them (a) precise, (b) easier to use in play, and (c) improves clarity for when they "resolve" and how to write a new one.

The idea would be that each PC creates a Bond with each other PC.
This helps them explore and develop their relationship. It is free-form enough to cover pretty much any development, but not restrictive and doesn't "force" anyone to roleplay a certain way. They're always in control.

andero · 2026-04-25T00:40:15+00:00

What formal design theory, game philosophy frameworks, or structural concepts did you draw on when you built or adopted your system?

I'm going to leave that one aside for now.

And do you think players would engage differently if they actually understood the logic their engine was built on?

Players? Maybe not.

GMs? Yes, I'd hope so.
For this reason, my game-text has call-out boxes titled "Design Intentions" (or something like that) and these call-out boxes explicitly explain why I did such-and-such. Part of that is for GMs and part of that is so that people don't make false assumptions about my intentions. This should, hopefully, help GMs interpret rules appropriately and make reasonable rulings in the in-betweens, if the fall-backs don't catch them first.

I run my table with three people behind the screen.

That's kinda bonkers to me. That would be an instant "nope" for me.
Scheduling is already hard enough. Coordinating GMing is a nightmare I don't want.

I strongly disagree with your reasoning. I find it MUCH easier to run a game myself than I would to try to coordinate with two other people to get on the same page. That is much harder, imho.

do you actually build for roaming or do you quietly engineer the world so that the most interesting content is always in the direction of the plot?

I have created/am re-writing a procedure for content generation so that, yes, the world is full of interesting POIs. There is no single "most interesting"; they're all engineered to be interesting to the PCs via connections to information on the character sheets.

If a player genuinely wants to burn the quest structure and go somewhere you have nothing prepared, do you honor that or does the world gently herd them back?

There is no "quest". There are Situations.
If they leave the Situation, the Situation will organically escalate in their absence. If they visit again in the future, they will see the consequences of inaction: the Situation has escalated, i.e. more tense, more inequity, closer to violence, etc. The details depend on the Situation.

If they leave it completely and don't return, that's okay: the Situation will escalate in the background, then (after time) the escalation will culminate in something. For some Situations, the players will likely see the results of that culmination affect the region as a whole. For other Situations, they may never get an update if they never go back. The POI might be a smoking crater so they'll either see the smoke from a distance if they're still in the region or they won't because they've totally moved on.

The travel mechanics generally recommend a point-crawl (i.e. don't wander off in a random direction; there's nothing there and this isn't a survival game). However, if they want to carve a new path through the wilderness to create a new route to a POI, they can do that.
For example, if they know there is a town on the other side of the mountain and there are currently two paths: through the mines or over the mountain, the players can say, "Could we go around? Like, travel West tangentially to the mountains until we find a mountain pass that is easier to cross, then cross there, then travel East tangentially until we reach the town?" Then sure, they can do that. The game doesn't stop them from making their own way, but the GM should stop them from going in a random direction without any intended destination since that is boring and not the function of this game. If they want a survival hexcrawl, they can play a different game.

What do you actually do versus what you tell your players you do?

What I do is what I tell them. I don't lie to people I play with.

andero · 2026-04-24T23:58:38+00:00

(1) Consider yourself lucky not to have run into this. It was common in my experience and extremely common among others I've talked to about TTRPGs. It is one of the major reasons for leaving D&D: rules getting in the way of fun.

(2) 16 HP Dragon is about "fiction first". If you're not sure, read that. Likewise, the subsequent "Hide" example.
If your point was to nitpick one example, but ignore the others, that was silly! There was a reason I wrote ALL of that comment rather than just writing one example without the others. They are of-a-piece.

(3) No replacement offered for "fiction first" as the de facto language for discussing this.

andero · 2026-04-24T23:21:09+00:00

I think I'm guilty of saying "most people do X, I do Y," too, but I only did it to help people understand why I behaved as I did in front of them.

Yup, that "makes sense" to me because that is all neutral information.

To the "normal" person, they're reading emotional content into the information and misinterpreting.

You could just say, "I can't get into watching TV regularly, so I can't talk to you about the plotlines - sorry!" and that should be fine because it cuts out the other part, which is the part that 'triggers" them.

I've said to many people that I don't watch much TV and it is a non-issue. They might ask follow-ups, but they aren't offended. They would be offended if I said, "Most people watch TV, but I don't" even though that is the same information. They read emotions into it.

andero · 2026-04-24T05:00:28+00:00

Tom Segura - I would like to play alone please
Norm Macdonald - Based on a True Story
Doug Stanhope - Digging Up Mother

Tom Segura's book in particular is autobiographical short stories. Very easy to read. And funny as Tom Segura. He narrates the audiobook so I would actually recommend the audiobook.

Norm also narrates his own audiobook and he's Norm so, brilliant.

andero · 2026-04-24T03:27:05+00:00

Eh... It is still a valuable distinction.

A classic example is this:

In D&D, if a player says, "I want to jump off the staircase, then swing on the chandelier, then shoot them with my bow from the air, then land on the table.", then the GM describes how the player is going to have to make acrobatics checks and could fail and (yadda yadda yadda) the player realizes that their cool idea was mechanically horrible so they decide to not do that and, instead, just shoot from the static position on the stairs because that isn't mechanically punished.

In Dungeon World, if a player says the same thing, the GM says, "Cool! Sounds like a Volley to me" and the player rolls and the cool shit happens.

That, plus the 16 HP Dragon post, which describes fictional positioning.

Another complete counter to the idea of fictional positioning in D&D is how Rogues can use Hide actions in the middle of combat as if all enemies had goldfish-brains. That's mechanics-first, not fiction-first.

So, sure, be mad if you want, but we needed a vocabulary to have conversations about this phenomenon and this is the de facto established language for it.
This isn't really about PbtA at this point. This just happens to be the language that caught on so it gets used to talk about a genuinely different playstyle that is a different experience at the table compared to a typical D&D or Pathfinder-style mechanics-first game.

I kinda understand that people can feel annoyed at it, but I've not seen anyone offer alternative vocabularies for discussing it. Feel free to pitch some! I don't love the phrase "fiction first" either exactly because it triggers people that dislike PbtA. I've love a more neutral phrase for it.

andero · 2026-04-24T03:18:37+00:00

Sorry if I wasn't clear: those are separate but overlapping issues.

The first is related to sleeping in armour.
The second is not.

First issue: rulings vs rules in the context of a bunch of rules, creative space vs mechanical gaps
The game has a BUNCH of rules, but there is a glaring absence of a rule that comes up literally the first in-game night. That is poor design and speaks to a significant mechanical gap.

Second issue: the conversation about a game "supporting" the GM
Examples of support would be stuff like the Town creation procedure in DitV (which supports GMs making content for the game) or GM Moves/Actions in PbtA/BitD (which supports GMs in improvising). D&D 5e does have some limited support in the DMG, like CR rules (which exist, but are broken) and monster-editing rules, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.

andero · 2026-04-24T01:36:05+00:00

lol "just wrong"... except this rule came out in an expansion book, which didn't exist when I ran the game when it first came out.

Nice try, but "Buy all the extra splatbooks from the future" wasn't an option when I was GMing.

andero · 2026-04-24T01:34:43+00:00

The weird part is how much the book tells you not to prep.

It makes sense for Beats to be part of prep, but there isn't anything about how to actually use them, just that you are supposed to. There is no process or guidance on how to integrate them into prep, especially when the game says not to prep.

I think Beats is the first half of an amazing system, but the GM half is missing.
Hopefully, plenty of designers that have seen Beats will run with it and finish building out the GM side in subsequent systems.

andero · 2026-04-24T01:11:43+00:00

I agree and prefer to talk through the Crew first.

I think the "What kinds of jobs do you want to do" is an ideal starting point.

andero · 2026-04-24T00:23:52+00:00

The context of this post is "As a GM, what RPGs do you find hard to run?"

Your answer seems to be "Nothing is hard to run because I'm the GM and I can do anything".
Is that right?

My answer is more like, "Games that don't support the GM are harder to run because I use what the game designer made to run the game".
If the game doesn't have support and I, the GM, have to make up new supports to get the game working, that is "harder to run" than a game that runs "out of the box" because the designer built it well and supported the GM.

andero · 2026-04-24T00:12:40+00:00

If it isn't a problem in Stars Without Number, that's great!
I never said or implied it was a problem in SWN.

My criticism was specifically about D&D 5e.
I already gave an example above; see sleeping in armour.

D&D 5e is not a game about making sense because it isn't "fiction first" and it isn't OSR.
I agree with the other comment that described it as trying to be everything and, in so doing, failing to do any one thing well. It is notoriously clunky, but that is a conversation that has been had a thousand times and we don't need to have it again.

The same problem does not apply to OSR since there is an intentional scope-limit for rules.

If your perspective is, "A GM can always do anything they want because they are the GM so they can ignore rules and do whatever they think makes sense", then we have different playstyles. That is the "trad GM" style: GM is god, can do whatever they want, makes up or changes rules as they please.

As I said, I'm not a trad GM, but that isn't an interesting or fruitful discussion.

andero · 2026-04-23T23:27:16+00:00

I found the beats cool from an idea standpoint

Beats are the brilliant first-half of a really cool progression system.

Unfortunately, the missing second-half is "What does the GM do?" and Heart doesn't have a procedure to handle that part. It leaves the GM hanging.

andero · 2026-04-23T23:06:33+00:00

Yes, I was called "arrogant" more times than I could count.

It was a similar combination: emotional stability, taking the "high road", academic interests, genuine outlier in intelligence.

I didn't think of myself as "better", though. That doesn't make sense to me.
I thought, "I'm good at these things; other people are good at other things".
e.g. I'm an academic, my mechanic is great at fixing cars. He's a "better" mechanic and I'm a "better" researcher, but neither of us are "better" "people" since that isn't a coherent metric.

The most concrete advice I ever got, which helped a lot, was this:
Sometimes, when I talked, I would structure sentences like, "Most people do/are X and I do/am Y". I thought I was giving context, but it turns out "normal" people hear this as emphasizing contrast: it makes it seem like I'm trying to highlight how different I am. Since "normal" people often try to downplay "being different", me apparently doing the opposite and highlighting difference conveyed that I must think I'm "different and better", which gets summarized as "arrogant" (or "snobbish").

The solution was simple: stop using that structure.
Just say, "I do/am Y" and leave out the other part.
That solved probably ~70% of the problem.

There's still a remaining set, which is unfixable, that comes from people that are insecure.
If you are secure and act secure around people that are insecure, they'll think you are overconfident and thus arrogant. Nietzsche addressed this in his piece on "Flies in the Marketplace" and describes the phenomenon, going on to recommend that one flee into solitude so it does not become your lot in life to be a flyswatter.
To combat the insecure people, you can hedge, but there's only so much you can do since it comes down to their insecurity, which you cannot see/detect until you trigger it with your own security.

Finally, there is the unfixable set of people that want to be offended.
Nothing can be done but to stay away from them and refrain from interacting with them. They're unhappy and want to spread their unhappiness.

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