Reviewing RPGs seems unreasonable work.
Far too many have tried their hand at the seemingly-easy task of writing one, and even worse: sometimes writing really is that easy.
Vampire: The Masquerade’s first ’edition’ looks like a series of short stories, but it had plenty of fresh ideas in there.
Gamers, GMs, and writers want reviews, but not many want to review.
The few times someone’s sent me something included half-baked nothing scrawls, and a few others with excellent ideas, but horrifying layout.
So what’s to be done?
I have two offers.
Random tables of D100 zany-silly things that might happen in your adventure need to cease, because they’ve stepped out of bounds.
I get the motivation:
emergent stories are great, it’s what the game’s all about.
dice are great at ’emerging’ those elements which become the story - the random challenge, the unexpected situation.
The theory’s still sound, the practice remains fun, but so many of the OSR books I see on youtube show-cases and itch.io download step into the wrong arena, and try to pass off underdeveloped ideas by making them into lists and adding a die-roll.
The most important things you should do to improve your GMing skills depend on you: they are unique or rare.
Generic ‘how to GM’ articles and books will not help with anything unique to you.
So generic ‘how to GM’ writing do not contain the most important advice.
If I could go back in time and give my younger self only one piece of GMing advice, it would be ‘control your stutter’.
It takes some effort, but it’s possible for me to remove most of my natural stutter.
I won’t read about stutters in any on-line advice; a stutter works differently for lots of people, and many people with a stutter will find it becomes worse when they try to kill the habit.
All rules are bad, but many are necessary.
A game about travel without rules for carrying things just forces the GM to come up with rules on the fly.
But resolving lots of situations doesn’t demand lots of rules.
A designer can cheat by folding rules over each other, so they cover more area, without taking up more pages.
Folding Rules in BIND
Unsure if a character knows some obscure fact about the local ruins?
This means - unsurprisingly - an Intelligence + Academics roll.
Nobody struggles to roll a D6 and add +2 in their head, but there’s something nice and immediate to any system that lets you just read the dice as they are.
Here’s a random proposal for a system which takes things into account, without any mental arithmetic.
This whole thing will follow the format of my thinking on systems, but that’s not required reading.
The system recognizes Attributes, Skills, and Equipment.
I can’t remember most of what playtesting taught me over the last ten years, but I remember these things:
XP on the Sheet
Players didn’t like having to look up the cost to buy Traits with experience points.
This seems a bit ridiculous, given that you only look up costs (at most) once per session and there are only a few traits to buy, and every experience ladder has an easy pattern as you increase the levels (e.g. ‘5/ 10/ 15’).
When your turn comes, play as many cards as you want, then pick up one.
If you draw an exploding kitten, you die.
These rules are a rare treat, because they avoid the nasty element of so many games: reading and remembering.
The first pitfall these rules avoid is any special notion of turn-order.
By just saying ‘your turn’, players can use their understanding of other games which have turn order.
This might not sound like much, but imagine stating the rules in full.
Of course, the Greek-laden formula is just a vector to tell the audience about Maths, but I still can’t approve, because I couldn’t follow any of the Maths.
So here’s some easier Maths for people who like RPGs, but don’t like Maths:
Standard RPG Setup
Each player has a 5-in-6 chance of showing up to a game.
Before the game, the gods roll 5D6, and if any die lands on a ‘1’, the game is cancelled.