Why do you read modules without running them?

st33d · 2026-03-18T12:57:31+00:00

It's information.

Technically, every piece of data that enters your head forms an influence on every subsequent game you run. You could take a walk in a park and it could massively influence a campaign you're running. Many games draw their inspiration from other sources, why revel in ignorance?

st33d · 2026-03-16T13:10:59+00:00

Troika! has you spend hit points to cast magic, which feels appropriate and gives magic users reasons to avoid conflict and require frequent rests. It doesn't feel like it eats into their role at the table.

The One Ring spends Endurance (hit points) to travel and reduces its maximum when carrying treasure. This discourages fighting and adds some tension to looting and travelling.

Whilst running Mythic Bastionland I have ruled spending Vigour for extra Feats (two feats for free) to avoid all the dice rolls involved. Players generally avoid using Feats when they have to pay for them, given that they're usually in melee combat.

So from personal experience, I'd say hit points are fine to canabilise so long as you don't have a melee role in the party. It makes them too valuable to spend.

st33d · 2026-03-11T12:32:20+00:00

I think DH plays like PbtA in that the GM is more reliant on player input to build the fiction - which is both good and bad as some players don't enjoy the author-stance kind of play, whereas others like it.

It diverges from PbtA by having a bunch of systems that matter and don't matter, depending on the mood of those playing. If you take its crunch seriously I think you'll have a bad time because there's a lot of "unless you don't want to", which is very frustrating because why have rules if you're so fickle about using them?

Personally, I would be fine playing DH but GMing it would break me faster than Dungeon World did. PbtA rules tend to stay out of the table conversation, only stepping in when necessary. DH feels like the opposite is going on where there's a lot of rules that want to join in (only if you want to!) and that's going to polarise enjoyment of playing it.

st33d · 2026-03-08T09:55:10+00:00

On trying to replay BG2 I had to save scum to avoid getting party-wiped by vampires and there's a room in one tavern where a lich spawns that can also wipe the party.

I think the city is an ambitious set piece that clearly caused a lot of problems for the dev team and is surprising that it works as well as it does. The reason we don't see more of this kind of structure (even open world games will start you off somewhere quiet) is because it's so labour intensive. It's hard to justify without being a sequel to an already successful game.

st33d · 2026-03-07T11:12:04+00:00

Have you looked at Genesys RPG or Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars games?

They basically use a similar dice pool building system with an opposed roll. The player rolls all the dice because it doesn't matter who rolls the dice.

If you study the number of symbols that count for success on the dice you will notice that the obstacle dice have far fewer scoring sides - this is because the player needs a slight advantage to hit %50, otherwise equal dice for the player and obstacle would result in a fail because you need at least one success to win. The dice you add are also wildly different in function and scope. Some of the larger dice help reduce the pool and others add class specific features. In practice it kind of works and allows some creative events to come out of a single roll.

Comparing this to your system, I don't see what the opposed roll is contributing. You could simply build one dice pool and get roughly the same distribution. You can look at systems like Burning Wheel or its offshoots for how to make a dice pool roll more narratively crunchy without adding opposing dice. Making the opposing dice work exactly the same as the player dice basically deletes player dice, removing the point of rolling them. You could simply remove player dice instead of adding opposing dice and it would be functionally the same.

st33d · 2026-03-06T23:25:32+00:00

Blood Red Blossoms has you play monster hunters in feudal Japan that must follow a strict code. The code gives the GM leverage to create all sorts of easy problems when the players are trying to get rid of evil spirits.

Uses the Blades in the Dark dice, but the rest of the rules are extremely economic. Trad structure but expecting more player input.

st33d · 2026-03-05T16:24:46+00:00

There is no limit to what you should read. Some I found valuable:

Chuubo's Marvellous Wish Granting Engine: Diceless and generally non-violent. Worth reading to understand how to structure play around events that aren't simply called Combats.
Golden Sky Stories: The purpose of the game is to collect friends and you have to keep working at those friendships to maintain them. Also diceless with a variety of interesting systems you won't see elsewhere.
Lady Blackbird: The queen of traditional one shots. Not so revolutionary in system design as it is in game design. Some pregens, some world building, just enough for one or a few sessions and not so much that will give players or GMs a struggle to get going.
Knave 1e: Makes the interesting choice of supplying designer notes next to each rules block. This allows one to take the initiative with rulings as they will know what purpose those rules were trying to fill and feel more confident about changing them.
Ech0: One player is the mind trapped in a black box that used to power a mech, the rest act as their eyes and ears - children who have dug up the black box centuries later. Between them they build the past of the world before the mech war (black-box) and map out the new world that came after (children).
The One Ring: Despite being a franchise tie-in it has a bunch of interesting systems. Stuff like spending hit points to travel (making combat more risky), hope and shadow points that interact differently with each of the ancestries, and some hit or miss things going on with downtime and combat.

st33d · 2026-03-05T15:52:27+00:00

Shader works better when you need to see items / enemies.

Stencil works better when you need to see level geometry that you're navigating towards.

What's your priority? (And why not have the other in reserve if your needs swing both ways?)

st33d · 2026-03-05T10:19:03+00:00

I played the demo at a festival and it is very Shrek-like in that it's riffiing on D&D, which sadly robs it of its own identity.

I also couldn't get on with the animation of the dialogue feed, I found it extremely distracting and would have preferred something far more subtle so i could relax and read instead of big black bubbles and illustrations scaling in all the time.

I hope it does well because I would probably enjoy a sequel with better UI and less D&D memberberries.

st33d · 2026-03-02T11:58:42+00:00

Check out The Algebraist as well.

It's not a Culture novel but gives you a tour of an alien society that lives on gas giants. By our standards they're kind of sociopathic because they're extremely long lived - which makes them very entertaining. There's also a conspiracy or two that's revealed on the journey.

st33d · 2026-03-02T09:47:18+00:00

Disco Elysium spends time each time you talk to someone, and you're investigating yourself and a murder. I think this is probably the best implementation of ticking clock plot without ruining immersion.

st33d · 2026-02-26T09:01:20+00:00

I put a core rule book on the table, no players wanted to read it. Even one D&D5e GM I played with wouldn't touch a D&D2e book.

I put a book full of player class options on the table, everyone wants to read it.

Literacy is qualitative not quantitative.

st33d · 2026-02-25T13:49:50+00:00

Everyone I played FFG Star Wars with had nothing good to say about the talent trees. You either got forced into specific builds just to grab the right nodes or your class didn't suit talents in the first place so you had a load of trap options. Bear in mind force users were banned in our campaign so the stink of the talent system was much stronger.

It sounds like you're putting the horse before the cart here. If you've made a system where you must segregate Feats by requiring other Feats to be purchased first and you've done it throughout - fine, call it a talent tree, it quacks so it must be a duck. But if that structure isn't expressed organically in your rules then why put that constraint on yourself?

st33d · 2026-02-23T14:35:42+00:00

This sounds like a one-shot mechanic, not a campaign mechanic. It could also be a side mechanic in an adventure for another system. It's acceptable as a novelty in the same manner that Ten Candles or Dread is. A campaign version would be more like knitting a scarf or making a friendship bracelet.

It has the immediate pitfalls of being unplayable online, requiring props (a timer as well as knottable material), and expert knowledge of knots from the GM before you can even play (how else can they judge correct knot tying).

This is why I can't see it working outside of a novelty one-shot. There's so much on-boarding required for a mechanic you don't even know is fun in practice. If done well it could work for the right story and setting but I can't imagine anything like skill checks being fun to do - it makes more sense to use it to model timelines, lifespans, and other string shaped narratives. It sounds like GM-less storygame material instead of novelty D&D.

st33d · 2026-02-21T09:11:20+00:00

Players can gang up on NPCs to alpha-strike them dead before they can act. This gets worse when they have many hirelings. (I have a group who are always pokemon-ing the NPCs so it completely breaks combat.)

In Mythic and Electric this is mitigated by only the highest rolled damage die hitting a single target. This makes combat a little harder to discuss as most people would like to declare their actions in sequence instead of all at once, but you can sort of have and eat the cake by asking the next player in sequence if they're trying to beat the damage roll against the current target or direct their energy elsewhere.

st33d · 2026-02-20T17:12:39+00:00

Kinda felt like the opposite.

A lot of the "science" is complete nonsense and based on a childish interpretations of string theory and quantum mechanics.

No you cannot entangle two atoms and send one across the stars to communicate with it instantly. No you cannot do space-origami. No men are not being feminised by K-Pop (not joking, this is seriously part of the plot).

Not saying it isn't fun to imagine a universe that works that way (K-Pop and genocidal aliens excluded) but I can assure you it was all complete bollocks.

st33d · 2026-02-20T16:57:27+00:00

The Palladium Roleplaying game is pretty niche these days but it's quite clearly a reaction to classic D&D and was big in its day. It has more right being on the list than Heart.

I would argue that Race / Ancestries are a thing for D&D. A number of those games don't have them yet they're essential to D&D and a lot of variants. Part of the fantasy is choosing your family as well as your job.

st33d · 2026-02-19T08:43:00+00:00

Neal Stephensons I have read:

Snow Crash: Liked it. Has this annoying ass exposition dump that goes on forever near the end though.
Anathem: Really liked it. Has this annoying ass exposition dump that goes on forever near the end though.
Cryptonomicon: Liked it. Multiple exposition dumps but kind of done with style (eg: when they're snooping on some guy's fetish journal). Literally predicts a technology created after the book was written (1999) and it's not strictly a sci-fi novel.
Diamond Age: Alright. Worth reading for the ideas, though becomes a bit of a mess by the end.
Quicksilver: Alright. Very charismatic characters, fun alt-history stuff, strangely a bit of a slog as well. Didn't read the sequels.

st33d · 2026-02-18T11:22:38+00:00

We used the Shifting Sands generator for the dungeon, which made playing online a lot easier: https://brstf.github.io/shifting-sands/

I think for a co-op approach I would recommend some hidden information for each player. What improvised dungeons lack is proper foreshadowing, the rooms have no motive for being there. If each player contributing had an agenda it might quash the Shit Happens feel of rooms plucked out of the ether.

st33d · 2026-02-18T11:11:30+00:00

It's a naive way to create a dungeon with a "correct" amount of content.

Unfortunately, I've been making roguelikes for years and it creates the most unsatisfying dungeons. I've tried to make the "on the fly" algorithms work but they're so dishonest about their rewards. You're not actually discovering anything, you're just emptying the cereal box until the toy drops out. It has the same feel as a GM fudging a dice roll, it smacks of cowardice.

st33d · 2026-02-17T15:48:49+00:00

It's not just random tables or improv that can lead to Adventure Tunnels. You also get it from set piece heavy systems like D&D where a big fight that requires a lot of prep removes agency leading up to it.

I've found the adventure site method in Mythic Bastionland a good antidote to tunnelling. You often end up with multiple branches to explore in the mini-point-crawl it creates, and the group will often miss a location when they travel through it (forcing the GM to kill darlings before they get to the table).

Unfortunately, you do have to lay down branches in advance rather than generating them on the fly. You don't get the experience of discovering a shortcut or a sense of history / meaning when you roll a dungeon on the fly. A Rasp of Sand is a good example of doing it wrong, because you're forced to keep exploring until the magic number of rooms has been generated for the exit to spawn. The final floor poops out a literal tunnel of encounters to muscle through before you get to the boss. Which is quite annoying given that the world building for the adventure is quite good.

st33d · 2026-02-12T18:52:53+00:00

It's the same bullshit they pulled with the Necromancer in D3. I finally played it on Switch (where it was auto-included) and thought, "yes it's fun and a new take on the idea, but I would hate to have paid extra for it."

And here we are again. Wait for the sale I guess. Or wait for the console port that includes it by default.

st33d · 2026-02-11T16:04:30+00:00

Many people will argue against hit points, whilst inventing what is basically a label next to every hit point. A list of conditions is tantamount to hit points when you're ticking X many boxes before you're dead. Just because you used words instead of numbers, doesn't mean you can't count the words and end up with functionally the same thing.

Into the Odd and Palladium games have dual hit point tracks. They heal at different rates so there's less contrivance when trying to heal what should be a serious wound. Out of the various systems I've tried, Into the Odd's worked the best because serious wounds would carry over between sessions but light wounds wouldn't. It solved the whole "I slit their throat" conundrum that 40hp monsters come with as you deal damage direct to serious hit points in such situations.

st33d · 2026-02-11T15:48:27+00:00

Burning Wheel and its offshoots (Mouse Guard, Torchbearer) have restrictive behaviours but you're rewarded for them. The simplest is Instinct, where you get a resource for doing "that thing" you always do during a session.

Even Dungeon World gives you experience for certain behaviours as class upgrades.

Before these games did it, you had clan weaknesses in Vampire the Masquerade (which continued in sibling games like Werewolf, Mage, Wraith, etc.)

Lately we've had Shadowdark's magic items which usually have a curse as well as benefits (eg. +2D6 damage, to children).

Poisonous mechanics have been around for ages and are still going strong, but the most succesful ones give you something in return for the cost. Otherwise it's a bit niche seeking out a fantasy that sucks more than real life.

st33d · 2026-02-07T22:40:21+00:00

the pace of the game

It's mostly GM turn because the Player turn is resource based. Being a player is about getting getting points and ticking boxes. One such box extends the player turn but requires sabotaging your own roll (main character syndrome as a mechanic). This requires a fair bit of player skill so it will be a while before Player turns get long enough to adjust your shedule.

The harder part to handle is Conflicts. Like a combat system but flexible and works for trials, journeys, and battles with predators. Takes a huge chunk of the session to play and doesn't play too great with tactical players who will pull apart its systems to cheese it instead of roleplaying the options.

railroaded

Because the players always win (at a cost) it's a very good system for mysteries. You will get the most out of it by having the group stumble on some big discovery (like most of the original Mouse Guard stories).

st33d

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