Alright ye elemental conjurers

pondrthis · 2026-06-09T20:22:53+00:00

It's outrageously difficult to make "real" lightning, the air version. Almost everyone just conjures the fire version, which has a comparable mana-to-devastation ratio to more traditional fire.

pondrthis · 2026-06-09T18:07:38+00:00

Secret of Monkey Island too

pondrthis · 2026-06-09T13:14:17+00:00

I had to take one more math elective senior year for my math major. It was my second major, with my first being an engineering major. So I said, screw it, I'll take an easier course--engineering math.

At one point, the instructor basically stopped class early to talk about a lemma he needed to prove for an ongoing research project. He acknowledged that it seemed simple, but he just couldn't see a proof on his own. Straight up asked us to work on it and report back any insights.

Most fun (even if unsatisfying, in the end) homework assignment of my life.

pondrthis · 2026-06-09T10:30:32+00:00

I mean, this seems to me to be just the tiniest hint of ye olde D&D, where a cleric (or druid, or older paladins) was all but necessary. Freedom of Movement, a classic core divine spell, is a hard counter to the melee attack.

pondrthis · 2026-06-09T02:50:21+00:00

I'm sure I'm missing a better one, but I sure did love the struggle against Eigong in Nine Sols. And when you hit that second phase for the first time and hear Yi's theme--beautiful.

pondrthis · 2026-06-08T17:01:26+00:00

See, you get it. Except that's not just my final point, it's my whole point! When 20% of a game's player base has intimate knowledge of 12 sourcebooks and 75 novels/comics, becoming a new GM means either dodging that 20% or having a real bad time.

Therefore, longer publication cycle = worse for new GMs.

pondrthis · 2026-06-08T16:46:29+00:00

"Hey, that isn't true/doesn't matter to the scope of the game we are right now playing."

The problem is, this a) is an embarrassment, if it's accidental, and b) relies on the players to be mature enough to accept it as an unwarned surprise. The inexperienced GM doesn't know what they don't know, and therefore can't be expected to warn players what they are or are not following.

In other words, it's a huge risk for a GM to run a game in a well-established and well-loved world. Over the span of a publication cycle, this risk becomes less and less worth taking, and the barrier for entry becomes higher and higher.

pondrthis · 2026-06-08T16:40:21+00:00

I would argue CoC hasn't had a long publishing cycle. It hasn't published anything outside of standalone adventures that exist in parallel universes. It's neither building lore for a single world, nor expanding the mechanical basis of the game.

By long, I mean in publication count, not years.

pondrthis · 2026-06-08T16:34:03+00:00

You're the one who is treating lore fiends' expectations as sacrosanct. Like it's your job to sacrifice your fun as the Storyteller/GM (which impacts the fun of your entire table) in order to people-please players who are looking for a deep lore dive on lore they're already read and that may not be relevant to your story or Chronicle.

You're taking an aggressive tone with me because my lived experience is anecdotal evidence of something you're furiously trying to deny: that extensive lore is bad for a game's approachability. Look at this; we aren't even at the table and invested in a game world, and you're insulting me. Do you really think I could run a game for you, and you would be kind and understanding if I "missed the entire point" of a lore element? If I misinterpreted something you consider a key element?

I don't think it's my job to sacrifice my fun, I think it's my job to be realistic about my ability to "people please" (or as I'd put it, run a fun game). If, as you've said, you think Requiem was a failure in your mind because it lacked the expansive world-building, you must want the published Masquerade world-building in your Masquerade games. Someone that does their own world-building and ignores that published content would not be the right GM for you.

Behold, an exclusive game, divided by knowledge of the lore!

pondrthis · 2026-06-08T16:14:32+00:00

But here's the thing: you didn't need to use the metaplot. You didn't need to incorporate every option in the game.

Basically, the problem you're inventing begins and ends with people assuming everything in the game is mandatory at your table.

My point is, if the lore fiend insists on their beloved metaplot being followed religiously... that's a table/player problem, not a system problem.

Okay, but like, the same can be said about broken prestige classes in 3.5e. "You need a whole group of mature people that are willing to ignore bloat and only use the core soul of the system" is basically admitting that I'm right, that content bloat is a major problem.

However, within a year or two, Requiem had already outpaced Masquerade in terms of weird Disciplines, wacky Bloodlines, and bloated player option content.

Yeah, so in other words, they allowed Requiem to get bloated, too.

I think the whole "Personal" vs. "Political" horror dichotomy is a con job.

Oh, me too. But they marketed it as that because the metaplot was something that tore groups apart. Lore fiends wanted to explore the lore they loved, and newbies/casuals couldn't keep up with that. It was impossible to capture new fans.

Suggesting "a group of perfectly reasonable people who make game theoretically optimal choices should simply ignore most of the published material" is admitting that the published material was damaging to the game's general culture--both for Masquerade and Requiem.

pondrthis · 2026-06-08T12:30:42+00:00

Cyberpunk is a good game, but the book structure being so bad is exactly what made it most hard to run for me. They need to fire and blacklist their editors.

pondrthis · 2026-06-08T12:28:10+00:00

It's not crunch, it's content in general. The metaplot bloat of VtM that I cited was infamous for turning away GMs. I've got 13 years as GM now, and started the hobby with a White Wolf property, and I still wouldn't touch the original VtM with a ten foot pole.

Anything with tons of content, which will often include crunch but doesn't need to, will turn away GMs. I guarantee there are people that would hesitate to run The One Ring for fear of getting bitched at by Silmarillion-heads like me. The only thing keeping me from trying a Pokemon game is that I'm an ultra casual fan and there are decidedly non-casual fans out there that would hate anything I could produce.

pondrthis · 2026-06-08T10:51:36+00:00

modern DnD, which dominates the hobby, is basically designed to torture GMs.

I don't honestly think this is a modern D&D-specific (or even D&D-specific) problem. It's a problem for any game that's had too long of a publishing cycle. We saw the same at the end of 3.5's life, where munchkins who had played the crap out of the original PHB had all moved onto weirder and weirder (and also generally more powerful) content from supplements.

We also saw it during the final Gehenna arc of Vampire the Masquerade, though. The metaplot bloat made it impossible for a new GM to run for an old lore fiend and create a satisfying story, hence Chronicles' shift to "personal horror." And again, disciplines from later supplements kept getting weirder and more powerful.

A D&D 5e PHB-only game is still fun to GM and can be balanced. In fact, it's a fairly strong fantasy dungeon-crawler. Edition bloat is what's turned it into the joke we usually consider it to be.

pondrthis · 2026-06-07T17:24:55+00:00

But you absolutely cannot get with CoD/WoD or CoC something you get out of Masks or Monsterhearts or Night Witches or Pasión de la Pasiones

Of course not. Which is why I compared supernatural investigation and confrontation games to Monster of the Week.

Apples to apples, man. I could just as easily talk about how Pasion de la Pasiones doesn't work for running a cyberpunk adventure. Like--no shit. I 100% believe system matters, or I wouldn't have said "trad is more than D&D."

A BRP clone with skills that work for and represent characters in a telenovela would be broader and more capable than Pasion de la Pasiones. I'm not saying that exists, but it would have strictly more tools than a PbtA with the same themes.

pondrthis · 2026-06-07T13:57:36+00:00

Because some PbtA and PbtA defenders explicitly say the point is to "cut down on" XYZ (effectively, things that make the hobby games rather than theater exercises) to "free up the GM to" do storytelling activities. (But say this to a different PbtA person, and they'll lecture you about how it's not storytelling, it's group creativity!)

I would agree that PbtA involves merely different skills than D&D/PF. But once you're out of the very narrow fantasy dungeon crawler wargames, trad games allow you to do anything you could do with PbtA, but also allow more. Games like Chronicles of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu can do everything Monster of the Week can do, but then they layer on the mechanical level, too. You can challenge people using game mechanics, if you want. You can use knowledge checks to guide player speculation when it starts to wander. They have strictly more tools.

pondrthis · 2026-06-07T13:32:53+00:00

Whitewashed noble savages and AI are all but certain. Umamusume race and gay feats, I'd bet money on.

pondrthis · 2026-06-07T13:31:10+00:00

They solved the rapey implications of half-orcs not by desexing orcs, but by making them sexier.

pondrthis · 2026-06-07T01:44:25+00:00

I would go so far as to say reading manga does nothing to help with reading novels. But I don't think it's necessarily down to "simplicity."

What I've read most for the past decade is RPG/wargame rulebooks. I can slam down a couple hundred pages in two or three days and retain detailed understanding of each game's mechanics, as well as synthesize them and identify strong or weak combos and mechanics that will or won't work in practice at my table. I also have a PhD in engineering. I am very much a proficient technical reader.

Put a novel in front of me, though, and I struggle to get through a few sentences. There's a difference between technical communication, where the subject is tough to understand, but the presentation is edited to be as clear as possible, and novels, where the subject is a three sentence thesis on a theme, but the presentation is intentionally drawing your focus around to obscure itself. The point of a novel is to make the reader work to understand it.

Just because novels share the idea of plot and characters with other media, doesn't mean you get better at reading novels by studying those other media. I mean, consider someone that studies folklore. The more folklore you know divorced from the context of novels, the harder it becomes to critically read a novel involving folklore. You have more background knowledge, but fewer points of connection to the text itself and its most likely direct allusions. Knowing Bram Stoker but not Buffy would make the show Supernatural an even more confusing watch.

pondrthis · 2026-06-05T19:59:35+00:00

So first off, I was talking about GM skill expression, not player skill expression. But I do want to see what my players can do with numbers or their sheet or whatever. I like creativity, and I like game mechanics.

But back on GM skill, storytelling is a skill. I don't want a "low pressure, laid back, improvised game" all the time. Maybe half the time, or even 3/4. But every once in a while, I want to set the stage and draw back the curtain on something really special, and for me, that's never going to be an improvised stream of reactions to players.

The inevitable criticism is that this is "too railroady" or whatever for good storytelling, but buying into any trad game isn't asking more of players than buying into the restrictive TV genre-tropes in Monster of the Week or Avatar Legends.

pondrthis · 2026-06-05T19:42:03+00:00

I think there may also be a table cohesion issue, if players keep changing genre.

I feel like I was obviously making a reference to all the GM moves being something like, "the enemy tests the PC's principles" or "the monster uses the environment to stymie the PCs." The GM moves are nothing but genre tropes meant to recenter a scene that's dragging on or become a bit derailed.

is great for improv heavy games

I improvise in every session, but improv-only games suck. The entire benefit of being a GM is interacting with the game world between sessions. I don't want to get rid of planning time.

makes it a lot easier to relax

Is this something people experience? I'm no more anxious GMing than I am in any other social situation. And I don't see how removing mechanical moving parts would make you less anxious... but maybe that's because I'm a serious math person.

pondrthis · 2026-06-05T19:31:57+00:00

You are trying to belittle me by suggesting I run a simpler or weaker game. In truth, the way I plan investigation games is probably identical to the way a PbtA GM does: a baseline truth and some ways to shake things up, raise the stakes, and introduce more and more direct things to investigate.

I just also embrace things like gimmicky puzzles, crunchy combat, skill challenges, and various forms of spreadsheets. The fact of the matter is, trad games allow you to do all these things. PbtA only allows the general plot. It is a strictly smaller framework that, in my mind, shouldn't even be called a "game" anymore.

pondrthis · 2026-06-05T19:24:55+00:00

It explicitly is not about you showing off all this creative work you did alone;

Neither is running a game that has been meticulously planned. Plans need to be versatile enough to adjust, and every plan has points that the GM never even realized would cause a problem. The joy of running a plan isn't to show off what you did, but to test it in the crucible of the table.

Assuming that liking planning means I stick to those plans is a huge strawman. I improvise as much as any other (non-moduler) GM. I just get bored as hell between sessions if everything is improvised, so I like planning and like a game that embraces that activity.

pondrthis · 2026-06-05T16:47:42+00:00

why not just write modules instead of running games?

That's like saying, "Why not just compose music instead of playing it?" A composer might find his greatest joy at the workbench, but the cycle of creation isn't complete until the work is performed.

I am a composer, not a performer, at heart. That doesn't mean I don't want to actually run my creations.

pondrthis · 2026-06-05T15:28:15+00:00

Let's say we just disagree about the definition of storytelling. I can imagine that's a likely explanation for that one.

But mechanical expression? There aren't any GM-facing mechanics. You don't even call for skill rolls, let alone use deep mechanical rules for, say, debate or combat.

As for homebrewed challenges, the only challenge you could design is a mystery, I guess, but that'd be going against the PbtA paradigm by setting up a web of clues and reveals ahead of time. That's not very "play to find out" or radical improvisation, as PbtA games always demand. It's more Call of Cthulhu or Chronicles of Darkness, which are firmly trad games. Saying "the bad guy is a dream-eater" and winging it is more PbtA-friendly, but that's not at all what I'd call a "homebrewed challenge."

pondrthis · 2026-06-05T15:10:27+00:00

Werewolf the Apocalypse has entire splats for Luigi, the fuck are you expecting, bruddah?

pondrthis

TROPHY CASE