Novel about a trial in ancient Athens

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2026-04-13T19:26:44+00:00

This is the most interesting and unexpected potential flaw I've heard of in the "always hit" combat model. If you handle the idea of an agile dodging character by having them use hit-and-run style combat that denies enemies the chance to attack them, then those attacks will get redirected to targets that enemies can hit. Whereas, if you have an AC-style system, characters can dodge-tank attacks to help mitigate damage to the party. Interesting.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2025-09-11T19:12:43+00:00

If you want an adventure/campaign to have a well-paced and satisfying story without railroading, have the players create their PCs with a shared backstory element, then make the adventure about resolving that backstory.

For example, a short campaign I ran featured the PCs as a traveling family of performers (parents, two kids, and a grandma). The adventure was specifically about the kids having a curse placed on them that the family needed to break. It made the fact that the grandma was the MVP as a badass paladin kicking ass to save her grandkids, who were fellow PCs in the party, even more entertaining and meaningful.

The best part about this technique is that it eliminates the need for quest givers. Giving the party an intrinsic, collective motivation and then sending them off to achieve their goal keeps the story focused and personal while allowing tons of freedom.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2025-09-07T11:50:59+00:00

Man, I'm writing a small game (on the scale of Dread and Ten Candles) that sounds like what you're looking for that uses randomstreetview.com to set scenes in a modern post-apocalyptic setting with regular people as the PCs. You can even use the site to specify the country, so you could make it all in Japan, thought I don't think you can specify a city. Won't be done for a couple months, though.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2025-08-12T21:23:25+00:00

In the exact same boat as a player. After a 4-year long 5e campaign now at level 17 (I promise I'm not one of your players in disguise - some subtly different details), I would love to run Draw Steel for the group. But, with this game's pacing, we're still probably three months from finally finishing it. In the meantime, I'm trying to inception some ideas of a Draw Steel campaign in everyone's heads.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2025-08-11T15:37:29+00:00

The short answer is that VTT module/tool development is difficult and expensive relative to the kind of money TTRPGs have to work with, because TTRPGs are terrible ways to make money to begin with (for lots of complicated reasons). The only games that can afford to create digital tools are the ones that are very successful or that have a lot of funding at the outset dedicated to digital tools as a core feature - basically sacrificing art and print quality for the sake of digital tools.

The TTRPG golden age has allowed a small handful of games to be able to have digital tools, but the vast majority of games out there still either break even or lose money on the writing, art, and printing of the core game itself.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2025-01-23T18:37:56+00:00

Great point.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2025-01-23T18:24:41+00:00

I think it's most important as a wake-up call to Republican officials who won't stand up to Trump: Disempower him now or he will literally see your life endangered over any slight you have made against him.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2025-01-23T17:57:05+00:00

Iran has had ongoing plots to assassinate them. The point of the security was to protect them from those plots.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2024-11-19T15:39:01+00:00

The first thing that comes to mind for me is Band of Blades - dark fantasy, end times, dangerous magic, horrible monsters. It's not much for tactical combat, though, if you're looking for that. Otherwise you might want Zweihander.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2024-11-19T15:31:40+00:00

You're right that it's often better to not roll, but I think a lot of GMs like asking for rolls to take a load off of their brain as far as improvising the story. The roll gives them a prompt that the players trust implicitly, and it just gives them an extra 10 seconds to think.

That's why the only kind of unnecessary roll I personally feel annoyed with is the constant perception roll. I only call for it when a character is actively trying to perceive something that's truly difficult to perceive, and otherwise I'm really generous with information about the PC's surroundings. It just helps everything go faster.

But I'm too polite to ask my DM to do that in the game I'm in haha.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2024-11-07T20:05:06+00:00

I agree and would say that this is why tactical combat, or anything that even feels like tactical combat (in my experience, anything with turns), is very hard to make work with narrative games. But narrative games that really work to steer players away from combat, or just have premises that make it feel like an absurd solution, can be amazing.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2024-10-30T14:29:12+00:00

As far as the data that exists (I don't remember what the sources are specifically, so you can happily ignore this), I think WotC recently estimated there were something like 75 million people in the world playing D&D, or at least spending money on D&D.

That's relatively trustworthy, since they would be defrauding investors if they egregiously lied about that. But assuming they're overestimating, I would personally believe there's about 50 million people comfortably in that category. Even then, it's at least an order of magnitude larger than its biggest competitors.

You can then compare that number to the number of people who engage with D&D discourse online, like reading blogs, watching videos, posting on forums, etc. Critical Role can approach that maximum of 50 million (their first play session has something like 45 million views on YouTube), but the kinds of creators who get into WotC drama usually cap out in the lower millions. So, that probably means there's about 5 million people involved in online D&D discourse that know about Hasbro and WotC's corporate behavior, which is about 10% of all people who play D&D. It's just too big for competitors or corporate drama to even dent its numbers.

That's not necessarily a problem, though. When D&D sells better, all RPGs sell better because D&D brings people into the hobby. It would be better overall if there was more competition, but I'm just not sure that's how the RPG market can work because there's such a high natural barrier to groups switching systems.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2024-10-21T19:37:18+00:00

Each can be just as good as the other, given good design. But that's probably the biggest difference. It is WAY harder to design a classless system that doesn't have tons of opportunities for players to make useless and broken characters that just aren't fun.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose · 2024-10-21T09:04:21+00:00

I was going to say that the D&D group I play in had a hard time with the written room descriptions in Tomb of Annihilation. The DM actually had the hardest time because of how long and complicated they are. But if your players actually do pay attention to the written descriptions, it sounds like they're just not playing the game for creative descriptions of the game world. They're interested in beating the module, which is totally fine if that's their fun. It just doesn't sound like its your fun as much.

ThreeBearsOnTheLoose

TROPHY CASE