Dave

The movie rewards anyone who's lived in Toronto. Plenty of familiar sights and sounds.

I caught a sneak preview of this earlier in the week. Never seen an episode of the source material, but I loved Blackberry.As the climax arrived, I just had this "I can't believe these magnificent maniacs are pulling this off" grin on my face. I just marveled at this movie.

Sign next to supermarket shelves reads “all deodorants are under video surveillance.”

Recently, there have been several stick-ups and one Axe murder (in the first Degree). Management has made no Secret of the need to increase security, but still haven’t found the Right Guard. Finding themselves underarmed, the crime wave continues to roll on.

Probably Enter The Void (2009)?

(My cinephiles started late.)

I'm sure there's one about a Hidden Green Goblin.

A diagram of yellow and green symbols arranged into a flowchart of sorts. Each of the symbols has text in it and labeled arrows connect the various nodes of the chart.

Great to see something close to a node map in Cyberpunk RED's scenario, The Jacket. It's characterized in terms of beats rather than nodes, but it's a step in the right direction. Every published RPG scenario should include something like this.

The Hidden Goblins guy? He's a smart cookie.

Do the same thing? When I do this, I read at my desk and pause after every chapter to transcribe the highlights rather than waiting till the end of the book. I bought a small lectern with simple clamps to hold the book open while I transcribe. It fits easily on my desk and under it when not in use.

Circling back to say that this influences how one runs the game. The DM ends up channeling enemy actions to the targets designed to resist them to avoid TPKing the party. Rocket tag looms over the whole thing due to how powerful late-game effects and damage pools are.

This is very firmly in the hands of the DM and doesn't require any modification of the rules themselves; just an adjustment in play.

I did a whole presentation about it at PAX. DCs above 18 should be vanishingly rare in any game if you want to preserve the feeling that PCs should try actions they aren't proficient in. There's no margin of success in the rules for beating a DC! It's all baked into the negotiation before you roll.

Same trouble at smaller stakes with the DCs for skill checks. Because 5e culture has internalized a margin-of-success approach to successful skill checks that's not part of the system's design, a DM's intuitions get skewed when setting DCs. This one's more easily fixed, though, with attention.

This is a classic weak spot of 5e. A 20th-level fighter might have the same +1 to Wisdom saves they had at 1st-level, but monster and effect DCs have kept pace with the classes that are proficient in Wisdom saves.

Yeah, I know. 😉

Maybe we needed a third rooter.

Kim Basinger?

You'll never root alone.

"Grenade" is in the name, guys.

Pretty clearly Twilight:2000, no?

This movie got pretty gnarly.

These covers forever defined the Elric aesthetic to me.

RPG scenario design will not improve until the products start looking like board game manuals.

Your periodic reminder that the expression about "a few bad apples" does not mean that the rest are fine, it means that the rot spreads from the bad ones and corrupts the whole barrel

Seeing folks in /r/rpg using the acronym "TTRPG" always gets my eye twitching.

The ground floor can feel a bit to first-hand sometimes, but a trip into the basement brings back the old magic.

YouTube video by Netflix WAR MACHINE | Official Trailer | Netflix

Does this fucking movie take place during RIP?!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFuE...

So far, the game's design seems to consist mostly of cobbling together the current fashion in OSR design and adding equipment cards. All this stuff about fairness or deadliness is GMing advice, not game design.

As I said in a different reply, I'd be more impressed if they referenced Torchbearer.

I agree that most OSR GMs end up making their encounters pretty balanced, which is why the kayfabe of monsters not fighting fair or PCs getting steamrolled by powerful demons sticks out to me.

It still feels like someone telling me that a shell game isn't rigged. The GM decides what's in the dungeon. The GM decides what qualifies as a clever plan. These are not features of the game design unless you consider GMing advice to be game design, which I don't.

I take your point now after a little thought. I can see how it might be pitched to 5e players. I'm not sure it's a good pitch since it's aiming for a more hardcore version of commonly accepted OSR principles. Aren't all the games cited by the designer OSR games?