BC Foley

You could houserule it to suit a new setting, but then you're back to dndstyle twisting the game to suit your needs and losing a lot of what makes that game and setting so fun as you do. So I'd love to see d20 engage in other systems, just ones they can make their own without eroding what they use.

(this is partially why Quinns I think had less fun with lancer because he had to do a lot of the work reinterpreting specific elements - the needs of his campaign worked against the system and setting's strengths, and left him with more work and less flavor because he had to housebreak it so much)

The specifics of expression (in narrative, factions, aesthetics) is where lancer gets a lot of its charm, and the work of translating that into something divorced from massif's vision seems tricky - making lancer without HORUS or RA is tough! Same for Union, Harrison, Hernycia, etc.

But it's also a game whose mechanics are intimately entangled with its setting, and d20 usually tries to stake its own settings out. Pastiche and inspiration abound, but outside starstruck (a setting that blm has a direct line to the creator for), it's always been its own sandbox in some form.

Lancer specifically might be an odd fit, as much as I love the game and would love to see big creatives with big productions engage with it. They could elide some crunch by player expertise, and the loose rules for pilot play might fit blm's preference for a system getting out of the way of rp...

(RPGs built with ap in mind in general might be against the grassroots or parasocial spirit of aps, but just from a design perspective a game built with performance in mind seems interesting)

There's very much a comfort zone there, and I can only imagine designing and performing on a pro level redoubles the need to know the tools you have on hand. But I'd love to see further system experiments in big ap (NSBU took such delightful shapes because its system engaged players in new ways)

Like, mechanically, or as a read on the setting, or some other aspect? Or is this more about the erosion of the term? Because I think I can see where Hades 2's direction arcs into something people could call validly call cozy (though the term is well abused), but I'm not sure on lancer.

At times an approach may be rewarded or punished (dis/advantage, hacking an exception or bonus, calling success or failure sans any roll) by GM fiat, and stuff like OSR are often pure GM judgment calls. But that narrative categorization does more we might think in making that exclusion already.

That definitional determinism is pretty quietly pervasive. PBTAesque moves can give that sense of 'these are the specific things you can do', but 5e et al imply a similar set of possible actions by skills - your actions generally fall under one of x action types, or else under an underlying stat.

Normal folk making a pirate ttrpg: swashbuckling action! bold ship moves!

My weird brain on a hypothetical pirate game: well the mechanical core would have to be a social/political persuasion game for consensus building among the crew, minimizing deadly combat encounters, building a personal brand-

Lancer is amazing, and I'm sitting on both DS and the new icon playtest for when I get enough crunchy folks in a room. The synthesis between tactical games and more narrative elements is a really interesting frontier of game design - there feels a lot of material to discover with that integration.

Hey vic. Welcome to the thing. Where would you say your interest lies in design space around ttrpgs and their design? Got a trend or type of game you want to follow or move away from? (Don't take this as interrogation, just wanted to give you space to express your vector and hopes within the space)

You joke, but stuff like you will die in this place gets close. Resource management for the warrior! Poker for the assassin! That's obviously no for everyone, but damn if it doesn't make that swing. 7pp has more overlapping systems, but also crazy individualized mini games for its day jobs

That doesn't mean you can't make whatever system work, but the unexamined idea that roleplay is intuitive, neutral, and untouched by rules just doesn't hold up. Even if we ignore skills, never cast a spell, never touch a die, there are structures in how a game approaches character, action, and time.

How spotlight works, how split scenes or montages work, how players assist each other mechanically. All before we get to the influence of the combat rules underneath (the notion that situations fall back on a fight - think how often "roll for initiative" is the capstone of rp scenes - isn't neutral)

How the game gates information (compare the reliance on insight/perception to something like mothership, where the baseline is to tell players what's there if they ask or to tell when someone is lying to them. Information determines a lot of players' toolkit and how they get it shapes their play!)

When skill checks and saves are called for and by who, how saves work and when they happen, how NPCs actions are gated and determined, whether difficulty is predetermined or by skill contests. Where all that places agency with the gm vs. The players in telling the story, dictating outcomes, etc.

How skill rolls are determined (d20+#, sometimes with two chances to succeed or fail) influence play. Which actions warrant discrete skills (see how heavily history gets stretched in games with high society, how we use tool proficiency as extra skills for any trade, the life and death of streetwise)

Long personal sidebar from the recent #ttrpg discourse about system matters or system flexibility - people seem to think that roleplay isn't shaped by the system, that because out of combat mechanics to DND are so much lighter/looser, they are a pure blank canvas on which to tell a story. And...No?

Self correction - i see the local discourse is indeed about design and how DND fits. Seems thankfully they truly rancid grognards aren't even a major part of the debate here. My bad for not catching up before pitching in. Glad it's the lower stakes, less drenched in culture war malarkey in here.

Folk mad beholders aren't whatever way or that orcs aren't evil or that queer people exist in the setting are ones thinking they're defending some older 'true' version of the game, not folks who want another game entirely (maybe there's overlap in parts of the crustier side of the osr crowd, idk)

Maybe that's the loudest on bluesky, but in the wider internet I thought the people decrying the lighthearted imagery most viciously were culture war grognards mad that DND evolved for many into something other than a bloody, gritty epic fantasy. Two very different contingents of critics, I feel.

I actually heard this got pretty popular, in the right places and times.

Would this mean that different types of zombie hives would go to war like that argentine ant based supercolony world war? Or just cross-polination leading to unexpected undead ecologies or hybridization?

That's the thing - while some virtual tabletops strive to be system neutral or system flexible, most system-intensive tools with character creation and codexes like Beyond will be system-specific, especially if it's getting into the nitty-gritty of how that game works.

I've used it for everything from tracking combat encounters, helping new players navigate character creation, and keeping up to date on character upgrades and events. It's great!
It's mostly online and free, minus some of npc tools for GMs attached to pdf purchases, but obviously just for Lancer.

Best example may be Comp/Con for #Lancerttrpg, which runs character creation, making npcs/encounters/campaigns, a dice roller/character tracker for combat, a rules codex, and allows homebrew content uploads. It's a map short of running the whole system, and super useful for an often crunchy system.

One factor could be the sorts of media people are growing up inside. Video games are (to varying levels of abstraction) overwhelmingly in implicit 2nd person. Social media has us externalize presentation and self into an artifact, which can shift the role between self as observer vs. subject.

Honestly, between assassin's creed getting people into the Renaissance as a setting 15 years ago and clair obscure doing "art as an expression of magic and genius in a beautiful estranged historic era with an undercurrent of skullduggery", there might be more of an appetite than you might think.