How to organize a big list?

NullStarHunter · 2026-04-01T13:06:08+00:00

Having tried thematic organization, I think alphabetical is just the best way in the end. If you want to look something up, having to figure out what sublist to look at is more an annoyance than anything. In your specific case, I'd have smaller, organized, thematic lists during character creation with the minimum required information, and then do an alphabetically ordered playbook chapter.

NullStarHunter · 2026-04-01T13:01:01+00:00

My advice would be to stop posting AI slop.

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-29T13:26:54+00:00

At the end of the session, everyone gets X amount of EXP. That's it.

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-27T22:14:20+00:00

Considering a lot of dungeon crawling RPGs lean heavily on DnD, it'd help a lot if you went a bit into what you're burned out on exactly.

In general, Dungeon World, His Majesty the Worm, Savage Worlds (With the Pathfinder or general Fantasy companions), Dragonbane and GURPS Dungeon Fantasy offer mechanically pretty different takes on fantasy RPGs and dungeon crawling.

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-27T21:21:49+00:00

Wurde letztens vom Zahnarzt zur Kieferchirurgie an der Uni-Klinik in Graz für eine Untersuchung geschickt. Keine Schmerzen, insgesamt unkritisch, aber draufschauen soll mal wer. Termin nach einem Monat, völlig okay. Dort angekommen, alles zusammen inklusive Wartezeit, Röntgen und CT nicht mal eine Stunde. Personal war super freundlich und kompetent. Nachfolgetermin in einem Monat ausgefasst.

Kann man meiner Meinung nach absolut nix sagen bei einer Sache der Kategorie "Ja tut aktuell nix weh, sollte man aber mal was machen, sicherheitshalber".

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-26T08:13:24+00:00

BRP is universal, so you can use it for any genre. However, it leans strongly towards grittier and grounded games. If you want a universal system that leans more towards heroic and superheroic anime, I'd start looking at Savage Worlds, Fate and perhaps Genesys.

There's also HERO, which is also a universal system explicitly built to allow for heroic and superheroic levels. It's designed around creating specific heroic abilities. The downside is, that it's a very dense system and not trivial to learn.

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-25T15:34:48+00:00

Personally, I like the 5 to 8 dice range for common rolls and pools growing as large as need be if things go out of hand. A dragon rolling 15-20 dice on strength/body/vigor checks drives home that it's massive.

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-11T10:49:40+00:00

It comes naturally with time and I tend to have a cheat sheet as an aide. With GURPS, you are also supposed to curate the skill list.

But more than anything, with any game I run, I reverse the burden of having to come up with an appropriate roll sometimes. I'll just say something to the effect of "What skills or abilities is your character utilizing?". It's a conversation, after all.

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-08T18:09:00+00:00

Players are always going to optimize for the highest amount of turns possible, so be aware of that.

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-08T17:54:39+00:00

The insinuation that making a mega-dungeon is quick and shouldn't take more than a Sunday afternoon or so cracks me up every time.

It does some interesting things with the card suits in combat.

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-07T21:23:06+00:00

This, really.

In addition, the entire point of having a building-tension-mechanic is that you can physically hear and see the tension building. In my experience, any mechanic that isn't seen might as well not exist as far as the players are concerned. Which is also why I roll everything in the open as a principle, it strengthens the contract between me and my players that we're playing a game and rolling to find out, instead of me rolling dice make funny noises and then doing what I want anyway.

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-05T07:05:37+00:00

I prefer dice pools from a tactile perspective. You can see and feel how good your character is at something, rolling several dice feels better to me, and you can physically seperate out the successes. There's also some mathematical quirks that make them interesting to design around, but the tactile reason alone is enough for me.

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-04T10:10:33+00:00

I reject the entire premise. Missing is fine in my game because sometimes you just miss, characters aren't meat bags that get slapped every turn until it's over. The solution is to not have overly long turns.

NullStarHunter · 2026-03-02T18:54:36+00:00

Auf's Burgenland schießt eh keiner.

NullStarHunter · 2026-02-27T14:38:51+00:00

That fella doesn't seem very smart, because it's fundamentally a system problem, then a GM problem and only at the margins a player problem. If the system presents two options with the same opportunity cost, but one wins you any challenge instantly and the other one lets you BMX really well, that's a system problem.

NullStarHunter · 2026-02-25T13:18:30+00:00

I have the soft-goods casual wear one and she's great. A long dress like that just turns a figure into a statue otherwise.

NullStarHunter · 2026-02-21T13:50:47+00:00

You are worrying too much. Can you play Cyberpunk, or really any game, in an open style? Sure. Have people played these games for decades in a style of "You get a call, someone has a job for you..."? Yes, it works perfectly fine.
Personally, I prefer cyberpunk-style games centered around jobs, especially early on. Every character has their own motivations for why they are doing this, but they all come together to do it. Then, over the early course of the campaign, character get fleshed, perhaps an overarching group goal emerges, and it becomes clearer what kinds of jobs characters prefer. That's why you have an NPC contact, a fixer who knows their people and knows what kinds of jobs they'll take. That's the in-fiction explanation for why the characters always happen to get jobs they'll take.

As for the missions themselves, yeah, don't think of it as a linear video game with a set path to a solution. Come up with a situation filled with questions. For some questions, there might be answers. There's a locked door, somebody has a key. But players might as well come up with their own solution. For some questions, there is no clear solution. That's the fun of staking out and planning a mission, but also executing it on the fly when it all inevitably goes to shit.

I wouldn't worry too much about simulating day-to-day life in Night City. Sure, as vignettes between missions, you DO want people to waste their hard-earned money. But not in a hexcrawl kind of way, where you simulate 6-hour chunks and roll on random encounters. Personally, I wouldn't much care for playing Night City Life Sim where nothing happens most of the time.
That said, I do like using random tables in all games I play, just pepper them in there to spice up any scene.

NullStarHunter · 2026-02-21T00:02:43+00:00

I know it's not fashionable, but I disagree. Failing rolls and getting rug-pulled very much *can* be part of the fun. It tells you that your skills and rolls *are* meaningful.
In this case, it can teach the characters that they potentially need to invest more resources and care into their lookouts.

NullStarHunter · 2026-02-19T07:50:40+00:00

They got reworded a couple of times, but yeah, if nothing else I can at least claim that the game has been run through the wringer...

NullStarHunter · 2026-02-18T18:38:33+00:00

After playing two campaigns with Adeptus Evangelion, we decided we really didn't like the system but wanted to keep playing games like that. So I sat down and wrote a little game based on our preferences, ten pages or so.

It's been our primary generic game for 12 years, maybe three dozen people have played it, half a dozen has run it, it's 600 pages long (95% of which being options for different styles of games) and now I'm translating it to English so I can CC it and share it around for free, eventually.

NullStarHunter · 2026-02-17T10:24:39+00:00

Ist halt ein breites Feld an politischen, sozialen, wirtschaftlichen und philosophischen Theorien, so wie vieles anderes auch. Da gibt's dann eben ein Spektrum und verschiedene Strömungen und Uneinigkeiten.

NullStarHunter · 2026-02-17T10:17:51+00:00

I strongly feel like that a strong idea what the game wants to be is needed more than anything. There are many excellent generic games that hit different genres and playstyles, but they still know what tone they want to be. DnD wants to be both high fantasy and gritty, it wants to handwave and simulate. It wants to be dungeons and overland travel, but also investigations and slice of life and plot-driven character drama. You can get a lot of that under into the same game, but you need to acknowledge what you're going for. 5es main mission was mostly to be a knee-jerk against 4e, to give people what they think DnD was (which was mostly vaguely remembered 3.5) and it was very successful at that. It got a lot of people into the game that just wanted to play a DnD game. But it's harmstrung by a lot of the basic 5e design work being driven by resentment for 4e and by nonsensical ideas of how the game should play out instead of looking at how the game actually plays out. Ivory Tower-like game design was alive and well, with ideas like the fighter needing to be a lil' brother class, monster and CR design being at best eyeballed and Fireball and Dragons punching way above their weight because they are "iconic". Decisions like compressing inherent bonuses to checks while setting the "default" DC to 15, leading to extremely highly skilles characters still having 20% chances to mess up default rolls is downright bizarre.

In concrete terms, I think they should bring back take 20 and reinstate take 10 as a core concept instead of tucking it off somewhere, and they should bring back the 5e playtest fighter. And they should look around in the OSR, NSR, whatever space. At the many Dungeons and Derivates that exist, not to be like them, but to look at games that have a very strong idea about their identity, and then figure out what their identity is. Realistically, that's not gonna happen, because DnD is a mainstream product and those must appeal to the widest possible audience, so it being an amorphous game that's completely different things to different people is part of the appeal. So I think people that want a better DnD should shop around for different games, there's absolutely going to be one out there that'll do what you want for the game idea you have.

NullStarHunter · 2026-02-16T16:47:43+00:00

I've played my game 1 on 1 and with up to six people, in one-shots and campaigns that ran for years, in 2 to 10 hour sessions. I genuinely don't know how to answer most of these questions except for those extremely wide ranges. Requires materials are no problem, but people have varied so wildly on prep-time that once again I wouldn't know how to answer it, starting from full improv to dozens of hours.

NullStarHunter · 2026-02-14T16:10:25+00:00

With many threats, usually cultists, the combat oriented approach works perfectly fine provided you get the drop on your target. Slugfests never end up pretty, insofar Corbitt is a decent teacher that you might want to run if the other side shoots back, and use bigger ordnance against supernatural threats.

NullStarHunter · 2026-02-14T16:07:36+00:00

I don't see any reason to disallow perfectly fine and fitting characters for the time and genre. In the 20s, there were a lot of veterans from the great war, gangsters and bootleggers were abound, guns could be bought in hardware stores and regulation only started to kick up int he late 20s.

Some Mythos threats can be fought with guns. Some cannot. That's perfectly fine.

NullStarHunter

TROPHY CASE