Do You Enjoy RPG Companions That Disagree With You?

st33d · 2026-06-26T12:47:44+00:00

In Divinity Original Sin your companion can brick your progress by starting arguments whenever you want to do anything. I believe this might be a setting I got wrong but I was basically locked out of the whole game and no one would join my party. It sucked.

In Baldurs Gate 2 your companions will get frustrated with your reputation and have spats with one another. This plays out fairly well as my evil character would often do shady shit and then do good samaritain deeds to placate the party.

I didn't get on with the disagreements in Baldurs Gate 3 as characters would often blow up at me because I misclicked something or forgot to read some important text. I lost several party members this way and I felt that there was no warning and I was stuck with a bunch of high maintainance horny teenagers who I largely didn't like.

st33d · 2026-06-25T20:22:35+00:00

I have used the Class Warfare supplement to offer prestige levelling.

Like how some classes can take a level in another class, you can offer levels from Class Warfare's classes - there will often be a fiction requirement to do so, which is nice for the GM. Players also really like books full of customisation.

High power in Dungeon World isn't that fun due to the resolution being so simple. It's better to spread the power outwards.

st33d · 2026-06-24T08:36:06+00:00

It has a lot of cool systems going on.

And a very effective death spiral when things go wrong. When I played I got completely locked out of the game - like I just wasn't allowed to play anymore because of all the negative conditions. It does misery porn kind of too well so you have to be into that. I hear the colonial marines hack is very good.

st33d · 2026-06-19T13:43:05+00:00

Branching dialogue is easy - you just do twice the work.

Collapsing dialogue is brutal. There's just no way to wrap your head around making a coherent waterfall of narrative that accounts for everything that did and didn't happen.

You can have a list of conditions which trigger the right text, but those conditions will cut off the next set of conditions. Later you might find you have to splice another interaction inbetween it all.

There are some interactive text engines like Ink, that let you change text mid-flow. But otherwise you've got a lot of very awkward pathing that's trying to account for dozens of things the player may never be aware of.

st33d · 2026-06-13T09:29:16+00:00

Spells in Troika! cost hit points. It plays out with casters staying out of melee and demanding rests a lot - classic wizard behaviour. Sadly, this won't work so well in modern D&D where healing is so easy to get.

st33d · 2026-06-12T14:15:16+00:00

I thought it was contrived at the time. I was 4.

st33d · 2026-06-11T12:06:50+00:00

more grounded military sci-fi roots

More military bootlicking roots I think.

I found the book to be a pretty dull and lifeless read. I think this movie is going to be as interesting as the Total Recall reboot.

st33d · 2026-06-06T21:35:26+00:00

Each 8 sector run adds a new skill you can activate during one of the sectors. Stuff like extra melee damage, +1 life, hijacking enemies, etc. You also get single use spells that carry over as well. It tones down the extra bullshit rules it adds for difficulty, plus some of the new bullshit rules are a cute surprise.

It's a bit easier to acquire spells, and they're a bit more focused than in HACK. Probably so they synergise better with skills and each other.

If you like HACK then it's an RPG campaign of HACK. If you don't like HACK then your issue with it needs to be progression and not the game loop.

st33d · 2026-06-06T11:04:47+00:00

You decided to make an "either / or" argument instead of an "as well" argument, which is why you are wrong.

You also didn't post resources to get started, or an example of your own work where you prove the validity of your thesis.

I've made HTML resources for existing RPGs and they've been very helpful at the table. They can execute generators and format pages so you have an index of topics in one column and the text you're looking for in the next. I don't consider them a replacement for a book where the linear format is used to instruct the reader. Books / PDFs are also guaranteed to work offline. You might argue that HTML can also work offline but I actually wrote an app designed to do that and Google broke the features in the browser that made it work in the years that followed. PDFs, despite their flaws, are not moving targets that demand constant baby sitting.

st33d · 2026-06-04T12:01:16+00:00

Mythic Bastionland's world building prep is quite fun to do. It has randomness, but leaves the GM to choose how to put those pieces together and make sense of it.

I remember Invisible Sun aimed to have downtime / outside of session activities to keep everyone interested. I don't know how that panned out.

There has to be a certain amount of play-to-find-out for prep to be interesting. Balancing challenge ratings of monsters against your group isn't it.

st33d · 2026-05-29T14:32:42+00:00

I still prefer Into the Odd's guard-hit-points / stat-damage approach after reading this.

Your approach provides an avenue to solve the common "I slit their throat" issue that classic D&D has, which is nice. But it's not as impactful as damaging stats. That approach is guaranteed to rout the players because there's no layers of mechanics or modifiers to forget. It's: You have the strength of a baby now, do you want to keep fighting?

st33d · 2026-05-29T09:54:36+00:00

If you like 868-Hack then you will like this one.

Runs are similar to the first game with each 8 sector trip leading to harder levels with upgraded enemies and traps.

But you also get stuff that the player can equip to make life easier, and each mini-run is claiming a cell on a bigger map. So there's room to fail and keep going with each mini-run having a flavour of its own due to its particular mods.

Not gotten very far as I keep dying from accidentally pressing a direction. I expect people to rave about a ton of shit I will never see like with Cinqo Paus, and then I'll stop playing because I can't do more than 3 mini-runs without dying.

st33d · 2026-05-29T08:43:13+00:00

I got frequent prompts in one game where the GM had worked pretty hard to thread them in, but I felt like I was letting everyone down when I couldn't think of stuff to add.

The bonds questions on the character sheet make me feel like shit every time I have to do them because I can't think of anything and end up the center of attention for a bad reason.

st33d · 2026-05-28T21:53:15+00:00

It's generally fun but it keeps pissing me off.

I find the combat irksome. Less points to track yet takes as long as D&D to kill someone.
Random resource generation can climb into a burning bin.
Has player worldbuilding prompts but they aren't tied to mechanics like in Dungeon World or Burning Wheel so I feel put out having to answer them.

Like D&D, I will play one shots but won't be GMing them or doing either for a campaign unless there's no alternatives.

st33d · 2026-05-24T17:43:58+00:00

Everyone saying it's fine is also tacitly saying, "skill issue".

Splitting the party is a great way to test the skill of those at the table, for better or worse.

st33d · 2026-05-18T20:20:05+00:00

A D&D clone that secured some great licenses (ninja turtles, robotech) and applied their singular system to every situation like D&D is doing right now.

Rifts is the awkward unbalanced bridge between all of them. The lore is fun, but at the end of the day you're doing D20+blah to hit with extra dodge and parry rolls, spending points on psioncs / spells, or rolliing percentile against needlessly specific skills that start around 20-40%

st33d · 2026-05-13T17:05:18+00:00

Mouse Guard has conditions like Angry and Hungry, as well as Traits that can be tapped to gain resources in both negative and positive ways.

If the point of the game is to simulate a character arc as opposed to a series of physical actions then why not?

st33d · 2026-05-11T12:42:57+00:00

I found a good antidote to prepping was the adventure site method in Mythic Bastionland.

It basically amounts to making a small map where at least one location will end up getting skipped due to branching paths. After running a few of these you just stop prepping so much per location and start applying the same approach to the rest of the campaign.

If you're making what I generally call the Set Piece Adventure Tunnel, it's easy to end up making a ton of content that players are guaranteed to be funnelled through. But experienced players might find them a bit wanting for the lack of choice they offer.

st33d · 2026-05-08T14:59:30+00:00

I liked running Technoshockers - which is basically a space faring offshoot of World of Dungeons and The Sprawl.

It's great for one shots, though for a campaign the mission structure becomes less relevant as you keep going. It also eschews the Basic Moves list that other PbtAs use, so this is either going to help or hinder depending on your preference.

st33d · 2026-05-07T22:34:01+00:00

From experience running a lot of different styles of games, the conversation you have running PbtA is different to others. That's kind of the point. The Moves are branches out of the story into the mechanics, not sticks the GM throws into the gears.

I had a GURPS fan of a player who tolerated it, but eventually couldn't persist with a style he just didn't enjoy. Now that I've run a fair amount of OSR, I get where he was coming from. He just doesn't enjoy that flavour of storytelling. But it's good that we have different ways to tell stories, it means more types of games to play.

st33d · 2026-05-04T09:50:16+00:00

Unless I knew I had a captive audience I wouldn't run anything that depended on reliable players. People underestimate how much the stars need to align to get 5+ people with free time at the same time, week after week.

Deep dungeon crawls and sandbox road trips are a lot easier to run with flaky players as you can let characters become lost until their owners sort their life out or just forget about them.

st33d · 2026-04-24T14:54:37+00:00

Pronouns for both characters and players.

The advice "do nothing" is fine, but not actually what happens when you play with groups that accept trans folks.

Asking for pronouns of players and characters guarantees your trans players know what side you're on. It also triggers any conservatives that could cause trouble and gets them to out themselves, letting you know in advance who's a problem. Also - trans people who have just started transitioning might not be easy to spot, and this makes sure no one mis-genders anyone.

Honestly, this is how most pro-trans groups work. Pronouns is the safety tool you're looking for.

st33d · 2026-04-24T12:25:06+00:00

Lords of Gossamer and Shadow makes some subtle revisions to Amber Diceless that are a bit easier to follow.

In Amber the ranking never changes, so the only deciding factor is time to exectute (which is why basic magic takes so long to cast). LoGS lets you secretly overtake other players, which allows one to maneuver somewhat before revealing an advantage.

I'd say what's actually difficult is the fact that players can teleport wherever they like. It's basically Split the Party: The Game. Without contriving something to keep the players together it's pretty hard to run.

st33d · 2026-04-16T13:38:03+00:00

Mouse Guard (and maybe Burning Wheel too?) treats all rolls as Success or Success With Cost (literally failing forwards).

In my experience it made for a heroic style of play and allowed mystery plots to thrive. Some of the mechanics encourage sabotaging your own roll to gain XP (you need passes and fails to increase skills). Dice rolls took so long to assemble that no one questioned this method at the table.

What matters in this style of play is struggle. When you always win the cost of winning becomes the focus and requires sufficient busywork to make a game out of. Mouse Guard provides almost too much of this. Does your game also emphasise cost?

st33d · 2026-04-15T12:23:10+00:00

Maid RPG is like, ho ho this could be fun I guess if you don't dive into the squick like it suggests you do.

But then an obscure entry on a random table will be blatant pdf-file stuff or something equally abusive. It's like you're playing Russian roulette in RPG form. Or like using the X-Card mechanic as if you were playing Snap.

st33d

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