Your basic combat action is an Attack roll.
If you roll Damage at the same time as the attack, then adding another roll for Initiative means every combat takes twice as long.
If you just spent 20 minutes on a combat scene that would have been 15 seconds of screen-time in a film, then 10 of those minutes may have been spent on Initiative.
My third BIND campaign ended in glorious disaster and nonsense which forced me to reforge magic.
Lax Theory
I had a magic system with a bit of metamagic ‘bend’, where people could do basic spells (fwoosh, fire!) then add a little metamagic to boost literally any spell (fwshhHHH FIREBALL!).
No more ‘control person’, ‘control people’, ‘control crowd’, and ‘control city’ spells - the system would present some choice spells, and let players put the pieces together themselves.
My RPG games follow a format which avoids railroading, without any need for elaborate settings or difficult NPC relations.
I call it ‘story weaving’, because it lets me stretch the metaphor.
Railroads are Inevitable
For all the complaints about railroading, computer games suffer from railroads far more than RPG modules.
We learn linear plot from films, books, and radio, and our thinking itself has become railroaded into A, B, C.
A friend was thinking about running a Call of Cthulhu campaign, where demonic hair-extensions burrow into people’s brains to control them.
I’ve never run Call of Cthulhu, but I had a few ideas for things which might happen in the background, and some friends added a few ideas.
So here are the bullet-points I sent him:
2024 AD
Class action lawsuit on AI-related discrimination reaches final settlement
Skibidi Toilet Company sends DMCA to Garry’s Mod, as Skibidi movie enters pre-production
You go to turn off your phone, but the power-button now turns on AI. Cortana pops up and asks how she can help.
You can turn this feature off by going to Settings > Developer -> Advanced -> Ethics > Ethical Adjustments > Features > Click ‘Fewer features [ ]’ > Agree > Agree > Voice authentication.
Microsoft issues an apology for incorrect instructions on turning off new AI features. ‘That page was written by an AI.’
“We are working tirelessly to fix the hallucination problems, and will be back to you with a better solution as soon as we can.”
The RPG scene has suffered for too long under its assumption that every positive feature in a system (realism, choices, fancy-looking hats) must imply more work to understand the system, and more time to resolve every action.
(easy but nonsensical) (realistic but Maths)
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[Mąrk Bórg] [World of Darkness] [Fate] [D&D] [GURPS] [World of Darkness Combat]
People imply the idea more than they state it, but when stated, it becomes quite clear that this is a social truth, rather than…true.
It serves two functions:
It’s hard to read a full adventure module - you keep having to go back and check you’ve remembered all the important points.
And no matter how much you read, you always need the module open at the table, so that you can check it again.
Even when you haven’t forgotten anything, you still repeatedly check the book in case you might have forgotten something.
I want to zap an entire dungeon into the reader’s head.
I want it to be so easy to memorize that they just look at a paragraph and know they can interpret the underlying world, and explain to someone what they would see.
The players randomly encountered an Owlbear. It has ‘Treasure type P’.
The DM then rolls 1D8 x 100, and determined that it has 200 cp in its nest, because all monsters like collecting coins, because all monsters in A,D&D work like hyperactive magpies.
Rolling a D100, the result of ‘58’ shows that the owlbear has no magical scrolls.
A second D100 roll of ‘03’ shows that the owlbear has a magical potion, so the DM selects one from the Dungeon Master’s Guide.
Like so many A,D&D systems, it seems more suited to a computer than a DM, and demands far too much time to prepare, even ahead of time.
The system begins by embracing randomness, then immediately switches to DM-fiat as the DM must select which magical items the party can gain.
It has demanded 4 dice rolls, and still hasn’t determined a result.
People who want to work with others on an RPG naturally tend towards Google docs.
It seems so easy.
They send the link out, people make edit suggestions, and you click ‘approve’ or ‘deny’.
Everyone’s generating spells, and spelling corrections at 100 kph, and it all looks great.
Git, meanwhile, looks like a technocratic chore, posing a massive barrier to entry for a great many contributors who just wanted to view the file and maybe add in their two cents.