Personable Thoughts

  In a confluence of events, I ran my first session of Mothership this week, after having played it most weeks for the last six months or so, coinciding with the Paul Beakley of Indie Game Reading Club posting his review of the game. I think it is a well articulated critique, echoing some points made in Dwiz' review over on Knight at the Opera (now sadly unavailable). However, as a self-professed "system-curious indie guy", I think Paul underestimates the value of a simple but effective chassis (or at least, he comes to the conclusion that it is not what he wants out of a game). The strength of the stress system is how simple it is to interact with - yes, the rules in the booklet may not be enough to fully drive play on their own, but perhaps that was never the intention? I would argue that the core rules of Mothership offer just half of the game, with the other half left open to be filled by modules or an enterprising game master: The quality of the rules should the...

  Inspired by a discussion in the RTFM Discord, I have decided to write up some thoughts on how the properties of a modern "roguelike" video game could be adapted to a tabletop RPG. Of course, there is a whole nomenclature discussion to be had about modern "roguelikes" greatly differ from the original Rogue and its likes Angband , Zangband , etc. and is now essentially just a marketing term. However, I will nevertheless root this in modern "roguelike" conventions, as the originals could essentially be emulated by just playing an OSR dungeon crawl . Let us first define the specific genre conventions that we wish to emulate: Gameplay structured around short-ish "runs". You always start at the beginning of the "generalised dungeon" and make your way deeper until you either die or succeed in vanquishing the final boss.  Dying rather than succeeding is the expected outcome for the first many runs. There is no going back to town to resupply...