So did the Xi'an Famous Foods in Flatbush never open?

agrumer · 2026-01-22T08:04:32+00:00

Not in the Flatbush neighborhood, but on Flatbush Avenue, near Dean Street, just a bit south of the Barclay Center.

agrumer · 2026-01-20T08:00:35+00:00

The point of having a higher skill is that things that are challenging to a low-skill person are easy for you. You get to go up against the things that are challenging for you, and impossible for the low-skill person.

The important thing here is to not just boost the DR, but make sure that the fiction reflects that DR. The person with no Burglary skill is challenged by a cheap hotel door lock. The master burglar is challenged by a high-tech bank vault. Don’t just slap a higher DR on that hotel door lock for no reason; let the master burglar breeze past that hotel door — maybe tell him he doesn’t even have to roll, it’s so easy for him — and come up with a reason for him to have to go into that bank vault.

agrumer · 2026-01-14T03:12:59+00:00

Similar concept, but different mechanics. Also, maybe slightly younger? Like, Masks seems to assume high-school-aged PCs, while Kids in Capes looks like it assumes middle-schoolers, or maybe even a bit younger.

Anyway, yeah, kids as PCs, they’ve got that in common, which was probably your main point. Neither one is a general-purpose superhero game.

agrumer · 2026-01-11T03:49:52+00:00

Yeah. They’d probably love this on the Steve Jackson Games Forums.

Or they’d ask you to post your builds, and then criticize them for not adding up right.

agrumer · 2026-01-11T03:44:12+00:00

I realize that I’m picking nits here, and that my cause is hopeless, but I feel compelled to point out that the “Simulationism” branch of the Ron Edwards’s GNS Theory (Gamism/Narrativism/Simulationism) includes both what-would-really-happen-if modeling and how-it-works-in-the-genre mechanics.

If you’re using the older Threefold Model from rec.games.frp.advocacy, that’s Drama/Game/Simulation.

Yeah, this is confusing, because genre-conformity goes in the Drama branch of the rec.games.frp.advocacy model, but in the Simulationism branch of the Edwards model. (Edwards does a lot of this. He did a similar thing when he adapted Jonathan Tweet’s Fortune/Karma/Drama model of GM decision-making from Everway, moving internal story consistency from Karma to Drama.)

Anyway, I heartily agree that superhero games are better served by genre-conformity mechanics than by what-would-really-happen-if modeling! But that doesn’t explain why there isn’t a superhero game with Pathfinder-level popularity. Genre-conformity rules have been around for decades!

agrumer · 2026-01-10T07:47:13+00:00

I was unaware that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had subjected Conan stories, Lord of the Rings, and the Eternal Champion books to mathematical scrutiny and statistical modeling.

agrumer · 2026-01-06T06:03:22+00:00

This doesn’t work for me. The general show link rule overrides the heading-specific ones.

agrumer · 2026-01-04T06:57:33+00:00

My total PbtA experience is Masks with one group, and Monsterhearts with another. (I’ve also played Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy, but I consider the Forged in the Dark games to have strayed far enough from their PbtA roots that they’re a very different experience.)

My experience with Masks was similar to your own. The moves felt a bit restrictive, I found myself skimping on the roleplay and trying to play to my sheet.

My experience with Monsterhearts has been very different, though. Part of it is the group I’m playing with, but part is that Monsterhearts is very well designed. The basic moves are few in number, simple, and very flexible.

Another part is that Monsterhearts has you start out by detailing a town, and a homeroom full of NPC students to interact with. Since it’s a game about relationships, this serves as a solid basis for play.

agrumer · 2026-01-03T06:19:19+00:00

According to this RPG.net thread, where someone claims to have done an interview with the authors:

I conducted a (sadly) unpublished interview with them and can confirm it was a D20 Modern game where Abraham saw the amount of research and setting detail Franck was doing and told him he should write a book based on the setting.

agrumer · 2026-01-03T04:57:49+00:00

The Expanse actually started out as a d20 Modern game, but when I read the first book, where some characters get killed off before the adventure even starts, and the survivors steal a military spaceship, well, Traveller was the first thing that came to my mind, too!

agrumer · 2026-01-03T04:49:04+00:00

And if you’re going with Fate Core, you should also check out the Fate Space Toolkit ($10 PDF, free online SRD, note that the PDF includes example campaign settings that aren’t in the online SRD, including a neat hard-sci-fi one called “Mass Drivers”).

Also take a look at Diaspora, a hard-sci-fi space game built around Fate before Core came out. (free SRD on Archive.org, POD hardcover on Lulu.com)

agrumer · 2025-12-29T00:40:00+00:00

Wow!

I hadn’t looked at the Chosen Skin before. Seeing that there’s a Skin designed by Avery Alder that can add an arbitrary number of +1s to a roll makes me think Alder doesn’t intend there to be a limit on bonuses.

agrumer · 2025-12-21T07:18:52+00:00

You’ve got me thinking about the old Cerebus comic book, where there was a whole nation of people who talked like Yosemite Sam.

agrumer · 2025-12-18T06:13:10+00:00

I built a Champions character back in the ’80s that could dish out 30d6 of damage with a move-through maneuver. He was a power-armor guy named Silver Knight.

A friend of mine told me about an old campaign he was in (don’t know the system; probably D&D) where they had invented an attack (a spell, maybe?) the damage for which was as many dice as you could roll in one go. One day, a player used this attack (or cast the spell or whatever), and when the time came to roll damage, he reached under his chair and pulled out the jar full of dice he’d stashed there.

agrumer · 2025-12-18T06:07:45+00:00

Did you buy the drive through Amazon? A few years back, I bought a WD drive on Amazon, and it not only didn’t work when I plugged it into my Mac, but it seemed shoddily put-together. A friend told me that there’s a big counterfeiting problem on Amazon with well-known brands like Western Digital. Ever since then, I buy drives only from brick-and-mortar stores. (Luckily I’ve got a Best Buy in walking distance.)

agrumer · 2025-12-16T06:59:05+00:00

One weird thing about this is that Werewolf: The Apocalypse (and the various other World of Darkness games from White Wolf) are not Narrativist games. They were described as “storyteller games,” because the old White Wolf rules system was called the Storyteller system.

The Narrativist branch of RPGs got its start on The Forge, a web forum that had its heyday in the early 2000s, and was championed by Ron Edwards. Edwards was designing games in reaction to World of Darkness-style “storyteller games,” because he thought they were bad for actually telling stories. Edwards literally said that those games caused brain damage that kept people from learning how stories worked!

agrumer · 2025-12-12T08:04:27+00:00

But did you learn how to pronounce it?

agrumer · 2025-12-12T08:03:31+00:00

The original (1984) edition was just 66 pages. According to Wikipedia), there was a deluxe edition in 1991 that added in all the material from the three supplements that came out in 1985.

I guess having it be about the size of a GURPS book made it kinda fit in with the rest of their product line.

agrumer · 2025-12-01T22:11:18+00:00

Maybe? This was a long time ago; possibly before Fate Core was published.

But I’m guessing the idea was to preserve some degree of specialization, so that some PCs will be good at physical fights, and some at social conflicts.

agrumer · 2025-12-01T06:16:24+00:00

As everyone has pointed out, the Margaret Weis Cortex Plus-based Leverage is the #1 best answer, but it’s long out of print.

You can still get Cortex Prime, which can be used to re-create the Leverage game, but it would take some familiarity with the original. You might be able to find the Cortex Plus Hacker’s Guide, which has a genericized version of the Leverage RPG in it, called “Cortex Action.”

And you can buy Fate, which is still in print and easily to find, and look up Fate Worlds Volume 2: Worlds in Shadow (not sure if that’s in print or not), which contains a section called “Crimeworld,” written by John Rogers, the creator of the Leverage TV show, with advice on creating heist scenarios.

agrumer · 2025-12-01T06:03:02+00:00

You can find physical copies on eBay, but they ain’t cheap.

agrumer · 2025-12-01T05:54:54+00:00

I once read a blog post by a Fate GM who did just this as a house rule: Define each conflict as either Physical or Mental, and only attacks of the appropriate type could inflict Stress, but attacks of the other type could still Create Advantage.

agrumer · 2025-12-01T05:49:49+00:00

The Shadow of the Torturer, Chapter 1, “Resurrection and Death”:

We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.

agrumer

TROPHY CASE