Wyrdfall Press

Young Castle Grief disliked GP for XP (started with 2e and didn’t use it), but older CG views it as intended: A simple abstract mechanic designed to drive the action and maintain the core game loop. Arguments of realism with TTRPGs will always fall apart somewhere in the line.

I had this exact discussion with some folks last night. "Simulation" isn't what people really want in their play spaces. because it doesn't care about the player or their entertainment.

Game designers figured this out decades ago and it cost millions in failed launches. Will Wright built SimCity with a fully accurate traffic simulation. Testers hated it. The cars behaved realistically, which meant nobody could build a functioning city because real traffic is an unsolvable nightmare. He had to make the simulation dumber before the game became fun. The tension is permanent: the more accurately you model a system, the more it punishes the participant. Real medieval economies kept 90% of the population in subsistence farming. A historically accurate fantasy world doesn't produce heroes. It produces serfs. Tolkien solved this by making his economy deliberately vague. No one knows what a gold coin buys in Gondor. That ambiguity is a design choice, not a shortcut. The Reddit post is funny. The lesson underneath it is one of the hardest problems in simulation design: fidelity and fun are opposing forces, and you have to pick which one wins.

Grant Morrison bashes HBO's upcoming Lanterns show and specifically the title: "TV writer/producer Damon Lindelof’s comments notwithstanding, the ‘Green’ in ‘Green Lantern(s)’ green is not ‘stupid’. Why does a writer attach himself to this kind of narrative if he thinks it’s fundamentally ‘stupid’? You don’t hand CSI scripts to patronising writers who condemn forensics experts and their haircuts as ‘stupid’, so why hire people who are ashamed and in denial about the comic book material they’ve been assigned to develop? Why don’t they turn down jobs they’re not suited for? It’s not like he needs the money, and Lindelof has proven that he can come up with his own ideas. What is this jockish dismissal of superhero conventions intended to prove anyway? Does Lindelof imagine it makes him seem less nerdy? It’s a bit too late for that, so what’s it all about? The only people who give a [expletive] about the Lanterns TV series are Green Lantern fans. Why alienate them at the start? That feels more like ‘stupid’. Is he right?

The AD&D 1e DMG will always have a special place in my heart. But it has been as often frustrating as fun playing from it in our current game. As a text it's fun to read. As a play manual, it's messy and intuitive. Looking up anything during play brings the game to a crashing halt.

For reasons that are too numerous to go into on X, the RPG hobby does not conform to video presentation in the slightest. A video cannot capture even 1% of the depth of experience in a real campaign.

One of the biggest dilemmas I have in designing dungeons is wanting to follow the idea that all dungeons need to have verisimilitude, and the creatures inhabiting it need to make logical sense for the type of dungeon, not be a random assortment of encounters that don't fit.