Some folks very kindly put up a French version of the blorb principles.

Matt Leacock just posted his difficulty ideal on BGG.

Design the game such that:
if a group of people appropriately self-selects a well-defined difficulty setting,
that their odds of success will be about 50/50,

Wonderful Middle Earth hexmap (with links to Antarctica, Moon, and Mars)!

Kind of love this idea.

I mean, in combination with some gloracular, tier-two–truthy way to get monster stats (including number appearing) if using a system that uses monster stats.

This situation sucks! ♥︎ to Meg.

With Wanderer, instead of using the motif table, I’m thinking of using story cubes or tarot cards or oracle cards or even Codenames or Dixit cards. Or scrap paper or even those li’l Japanese cardboard flashcard keyrings. Or writing the motifs in the margin of all the pages (writing some of them several times) and flipping to a random page.

I’m hoping the rest of the game—the themes, the adventures, the episodes, the inspiration structure, the questions—will really fly without the grid-based lookup.

I’ve been asked a couple of times if I came up with this word.

Someone on Fedi told me that this game is inspired by some of my writings (among other influences, I’m sure). Looks like it has a lot of the stuff I love, not just fighting but day-to-day living, crafting, logistics.

Once more stumbling into so much discourse about me that I had never heard of.

First of all, they’re codifying one variant of antiblorb.

Li’l known fact: you don’t have to JOESKY tax if you’ve drank beer or otherwise can’t be arsed! As per last paragraph here.

So fight on, keyboard warriors!

And to Technoskald but that one I had seen and dug before!

Dwiz (is that someone from S-G or WRNU? They seemed to have a rock solid grasp on my mighty works) also linked to.

Great! Similar vibes to my own “riss” except I wrote RISS before I became a good writer and it shows.

This is great.

“Designer (?)”, I love that.

Sword World fan-translated to English.

Via A Reyes on dice.camp.

God this is so spot on.

So, designers, please find the players everyone else hates. Find them and coerce them into play games with you. Don’t guide them or help them or anything else, let them make the most ridiculous and broken interpretations and then fix them afterwards.

It will make your game and your rules so much stronger.

I had a hard time finding Carr’s Critical Recaps but here they are.

Here is another thread slagging PWL.

To me, the only alternative to PWL is to have the DM serve up a string of encounters that’s one-by-one “balanced” against the party at that level. Meaning that it’s in some way the DM’s fault if the party loses (overly easily wins). It’s a playstyle with some pros and cons.

The fun with PWL is that you can have a more exploratory type of game world where the world is what it is and the monsters in that world are what they are and you run into them or you run from them. It can be set up such that more distant = more dangerous, but monsters are only balanced relative each other, not the party“. That kind of game is my jam. It also has some pros and cons.

Main point is that PWL, or the gist behind PWL, isn’t just all bad, always bad, misguided, 5e-wannabee stuff. There is an actual point to it.