Recent content by GMMichael

I GM a game that includes a PC who plays a gnome with a furry woodland friend: a giant badger. I also GM a rules-light game that has no rules for animal companions: they're not required to act on your turn, they don't have power progression tables, and you don't lose a point of Constitution...

First thought: "classic feel with modern design" is just something the marketers put in there. There's a big dollar for that. Classic to me means lots of tables, character mortality, blue-grid maps, hexes, and four whole classes to choose from. Modern design means fewer tables, character...

Well, our friend the 20th level fighter (who's having a bad day if his party is fighting a gargantuan red dragon) has, what, 20d10 hit points, plus 20x5 Con bonus points? About 210 HP? A damage boost like you're proposing is a first-round kill on the fighter who gets hit by a good multiattack...

It can. The 5RD neatly cuts 1000 pages down to, um, 403 pages. I might like "long form" games if I were a teenager with nothing better to do than learn/memorize that much material. But as a non-teenager GM, I'm not about to memorize hundreds of pages of info, and it's hard to imagine a...

That depends on how you define powerful and important. But Modos 2 does it all anyway, so... :geek:

I'm not super-excited about running a 2077 druid, but... ...I did call on druids to start subverting science. A "gene-altering company" sounds like something an oil company stockholder would get into. But it sounds like the antithesis of natural order, so I don't see druids getting involved...

That sounds incredibly boring. I hope he can hire a manager. Negotiating contracts could be interesting if terms other than gold are involved. And there's the problem of suppliers 1) not fully meeting orders, and 2) causing problems with what they actually deliver. Of course, there's always...

Each unused setting element is one that you don't have to write in the future. Each adventure created is one that can be reskinned/revised for your current group, or reused for your next group.

Agreed, that's a lot to keep up with. But is it "exception-based design?" I don't know the ins and outs of the above games, so I can't tell that there are exceptions being made. What I can easily see is that each of the above is a combat maneuver with requirements and special outcomes, which...

You're on to something: magma druids. Life is a disease on the surface of an otherwise elementally beautiful blob. But we digress...

Druids can probably see the writing on the wall and logical conclusions of human scientific development: factory farms, animal testing, GMOs. The irony is that this puts them in a similar position as oil companies; they need to disrupt and confuse the findings of science to promote their (polar...

If I reduced my RPG spending any further, I'd be making a profit. I hope things turn around for you, @MNblockhead !

Ah. Too much game is when I need to use the table of contents, or index, of a rulebook during play. Having one or two bookmarked pages for making rules references is about right for me.

Ouch! Did you keep the old books? Yup. The future moves fast, especially in 2077. Try Modos 2, which has two features that would be great for cyberpunk, and one that isn't: PCs have Physical and Mental attributes with separate damage pools, which make separating net-space and meat-space...

So, pretty much anything can be role-playing, and you're not interested in the thread title or first question posed? I wish I could help, but I'll need a TL;DR or other clarifying element.