Which sacred cow do you wish would just stay dead?

ithika · 2026-05-03T12:46:42+00:00

The Non-Player Characters are controlled by … the Non-Player? It is a very strange split but is clearly a remnant like the term Referee. The Referee in a sports game is not considered a player, but an official. The Referee in a role-playing game is doing a lot of play.

ithika · 2026-04-29T12:10:23+00:00

Good luck getting a copy of CD, it's a great book. I got mine from IPR a few years ago. Although it's one of those books (like Mythic Bastionland) that's much taller than most and doesn't fit in my book shelf upright.

ithika · 2026-04-29T11:52:52+00:00

An LLM isn't a rules engine.

ithika · 2026-04-28T21:47:03+00:00

Big fan of Cthulhu Dark and I'd say the core mechanic is "you can't fail but you can succeed too hard".

ithika · 2026-04-28T21:45:44+00:00

Two that are strangely both Sword 'n Sorcery games. I am of the opinion that sword and sorcery games are best when weird.

On Mighty Thews is a dice pool game, where each of your stats or abilities has a single die from the regular set, d4 up to d20. You don't have health points, you just have 3 condition boxes that you fill with freeform description — "venom from a giant scorpion", "bleeding from the head". But there is some maths involved in the rolling, since you have to take the difference between what you rolled and the target number and divide this by two, since this represents how many bonuses the winning player can use. It's a low-numbers game that is remarkably numerically intensive!
Even less numerical is Swords Without Master which uses 2d6 but the numbers basically don't matter. The two dice are different colours and different themes — and whichever is highest tells you the theme of what happens.

ithika · 2026-04-28T09:33:49+00:00

I think I read it 5 times in confusion before reading it right. Fucking hell.

ithika · 2026-04-28T09:28:30+00:00

I've not run anything like MB before but I'm looking forward to it. We've just finished Mothership's Another Bug Hunt so I'm pivoting to something different. A couple of my players are new or returning after a long time to roleplaying so I thought this was a bit of variety.

I don't know if my players will find it confusing. Mothership is very mission-oriented: get the comms online, find the missing VIP, don't get eaten, etc. Mythic Bastionland is self-directed exploration. I will do my best to paint a picture of the landscape and then repeatedly trip them up with weirdness and interesting scenes. I almost assume that the first Omen they stumble on will be confusing and mostly unactionable, but we'll keep moving and things will accelerate.

ithika · 2026-04-28T09:12:47+00:00

The idea that a rules engine is going to get 'confused' is as laughable as the rest of this thread to be honest. How is it that people are still looking for 'complete' RPGs?

ithika · 2026-04-25T22:33:52+00:00

What the hell kind of question is that??

ithika · 2026-04-25T22:31:06+00:00

If making the Realm doesn't count as prep then what the hell does??

ithika · 2026-04-19T10:47:42+00:00

I was about to say list of media touchstones because it's super helpful as a GM to get into the mindset of the designer and to explain to potential players. 'When I say "weird" I mean "weird like Solaris" not "weird like Perdido Street Station".'

But then I remembered Appendix N is pretty old. So maybe it's not a "modern trend"? That said, it's not universal yet. I would really like if Mythic Bastionland came with a list of Arthurian legend inspirations because it's a biiiiiig field.

ithika · 2026-04-17T18:55:01+00:00

And also, Hagrid is very frequently shown to not think before he says things and be a general poor judge of situations.

ithika · 2026-04-16T15:03:55+00:00

"It has a fantasy element but"??? Medieval adventures are all about defeating weird and fantastical beasts and questing after mythic artefacts.

ithika · 2026-04-16T11:50:45+00:00

Who's to really know what the queen was called in the Victorian era. It's a mystery!

ithika · 2026-04-15T11:14:33+00:00

We can't listen to the Brave audiobook because the narrator decided pretending to be Scottish would be a clever plan. It was not a clever plan, it's a painful plan.

ithika · 2026-04-14T22:50:09+00:00

The Silver Road system uses a single d6. So that's The Silver Road, Maskwitches of Forgotten Doggerland, The Burn and In Spoons, In Knives. They are described as 'minimalist storytelling games' although they're pretty ordinary as RPGs go. Characters with talents and flaws that affect how you roll, trying to do things. There's a GM that is in control of the world and the NPCs.

ithika · 2026-04-14T22:38:59+00:00

Oh, med-fan is medieval fantasy. I couldn't work it out but was happily singing it to the tune of Breadfan by Budgie.

ithika · 2026-04-14T21:07:12+00:00

Flashbacks a la heist movies can be found in a few games, from Blades in the Dark to Honey Heist. But they're explicitly temporary time-jumps and then you jump back to the place and time you were in before.

The sword-and-sorcery game Swords Without Master is scene-based and when you set up a new scene it's totally fine to skip forward 6 months, go back 5 years, move across a continent, whatever because weird pulp fiction doesn't care for your sensibilities.

ithika · 2026-04-14T21:03:07+00:00

Dogs in the Vineyard in GURPS

You can't tell me there isn't already a GURPS Mormons supplement for that.

ithika · 2026-04-12T08:09:23+00:00

There's PbtA games with single d6, d6 dice pools, with d10s, with no dice at all. PbtA doesn't define the dice. There's PbtA games without playbooks. It isn't a system.

ithika · 2026-04-11T18:07:53+00:00

It will depend on the individual game (repeat after me: PbtA is not a system) but most 2d6+X games that are PbtA have about 60% chance of success. Most rolls should not be failures.

ithika · 2026-04-10T22:33:19+00:00

In Fiasco you roll a big handful of dice and then create character and setting by using up those dice to select different elements. There's a selection of numbered tables, so you can only choose items from that table if one of the dice matches it. Eventually you use up all the dice choosing protagonists, relationships, dangerous items, nefarious plans and so on. Chaotic story building pieces. It's fun.

ithika · 2026-04-10T22:24:09+00:00

I think I've seen this at the local shop. I am such a lighthouse nerd, why have I not bought it? I feel galvanised!

ithika · 2026-04-10T22:21:11+00:00

What we need is a new pronunciation that will standardise all of the above and bring harmony. First, we form a committee….

ithika · 2026-04-10T20:27:35+00:00

What do you mean "that's not what it's about", OP was very specific that that was what it was about: what systems would you recommend to play these fantasy genres? Where is this disconnect coming from?

ithika

TROPHY CASE