@Printdevil I am trying to parse 'bearded dragonsfoot', but am struggling dear Charnock

@Printdevil @RogerBW @BigJackBrass @Taskerland @satsuma

It's a euphemism for a colleague from Junkshop and my historical gaming, who is a guru of AD&D at Dragonsfoot to the point of it being a pathology. He affects a goatee.

Hence "Bearded Dragonsfoot"

@devilsjunkshop

@DarkestKale

@Printdevil @devilsjunkshop Thank you for taking the time to elaborate, I really appreciate it

@RogerBW @BigJackBrass @Taskerland @Printdevil that’s pretty much the pitch of Delta Green where the agents realise that they are committing atrocities in the name of a government cover up, and going mad because of it

It preserves some degree of dignity and decorum saying things like Bearded Dragonsfoot, rather than naming names.

@DarkestKale @devilsjunkshop

Although sometimes decorum is sacrificed on the altar of "shitraker with a yacht"

@DarkestKale @devilsjunkshop

Charnock Yes. It’s moving from board-games and MMORPGs into TTRPGs and expecting there to be a button on your character sheet that you can press.

Moreau Vazh I like games with feats, and skills lists, and numbers that present a framework for differentiating a character’s skills and learning from the players’. I kind of hate paper buttons, though, and it’s exactly because of players seeing them as signals that it’s a board game experience.

I prefer a high trust environment with a… a physics engine, as it were. A consistent and internally consistent set of tools and progression systems. The vast majority of people who talk about such games essentially demand low trust environments where they are entitled to not just have a say in how their choices are adjudicated, but also in what everyone else’s choices can be.

I once had someone reply to one of my YouTube comments on this saying that they believed that all tables should run strictly RAW, because then they didn’t have to vet the GM before dropping into the game, and it’s like… No wonder I can’t stand talking to these people.

Vetting the GM is the sort of thing I find really strange as a concept.

High Trust with a physics engine is probably how I play, but with modelled mini games relevant to the environment of the game - like there might be a structured farming bit, or a structured scavenging bit, just depending on the game. They're usually slightly crunchier than the RP itself, but are generally something the players want to keep track of/game out but don't want to play out.

@kichae @Taskerland

@kichae The broader hobby seems weirdly paranoid about such matters.

Vetting GMs and insisting upon upon running games as written? What is that even guarding against? Is it that unbearable to have someone tell you that your fireball won't go around corners?

@satsuma @BigJackBrass @Taskerland @Printdevil Yeah that's why I prefer @shimminbeg 's Tetrahedron Group.

@Printdevil With the family group there's a more than even chance there won't even be a fight as they've mostly been wandering the land befriending things, rescuing goblins, helping troubled spirits find their way to the light and such.

@Taskerland @RogerBW

@RogerBW @BigJackBrass @Taskerland @Printdevil @satsuma have had this go well exactly once. a GURPSplayer created a vampire hunter PC.During a session he was discussing killing vampires. Another PC asked if they collapsed to dust or something. The player fumbled and looked to the GM who said “no, they just, y’know, scream and bleed and die.” The player looks around the table shocked and says “oh no. I’m a serial killer.”

@RogerBW @BigJackBrass @Taskerland @Printdevil @satsuma key thing though, the player brought up the question and chose to lean into the answer. The GM played the response straight-faced in a fairly low buy-in game. Players knew each other well/had high trust, players liked riffing off each other and the GM, modern day conspiracy setting with a broad tent, open character concepts from a baker to a banker to a vampire hunter, and undergrads just having fun.

@WolfeRJ @BigJackBrass @Taskerland @Printdevil @satsuma Having been brought up on the classics, I call this "gold dissolves in aqua regia". Yes, but so does everything else.

Aqua Regia is useful in the production of dangerous orange smoke.

@RogerBW @WolfeRJ @BigJackBrass @Taskerland @satsuma

I've a whole set of agencies over the years, but of the last 20 I've found I prefer increasingly the normalcy of civilian interactions with "things"

At a table in a big group who play lots of different games an agency involved is good for keeping things moving though.

@RogerBW @satsuma @BigJackBrass @Taskerland @shimminbeg

Have you met my family? They're all deranged martial artists and loons.

@devilsjunkshop @Taskerland @RogerBW

@Printdevil @satsuma @BigJackBrass @Taskerland @shimminbeg Yeah, but my point is that Tetra is, at least as far as I'm concerned as a player, very much a reaction to the whole "we have to do horrible things that the sheep will never understand" mindset—which is very much where a lot of DG games seem to start and end.

Thomas Norton's The Ordinal of Alchemy is a great book. Weirdly in prose, it's one of the last books about "how to do stuff with things" before Alchemy becomes a philosophical artform. The books of that time around the 1400-1500s are packed with brilliant stuff to accommodate for the lack of structured chemical theory. Norton has a whole scale of temperatures with stuff like "the point at which duck fat melts"

@RogerBW @WolfeRJ @BigJackBrass @Taskerland @satsuma