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- “Realistic” Fantasy: Chivalry & Sorcery
- High Fantasy: HARP
- Space Opera: Space Opera
- Science Fiction: CORPS or EABA
- Dieselpunk: Tomorrow City
- Modern: CORPS or BRP
- General Purpose: Spark, FATE (typically Accelerated Edition), EABA, or a BRP hack
My Dearest Sinophobes:
Your knee-jerk downvoting of anything that features any hint of Chinese content doesn’t hurt my feelings. It just makes me point an laugh, Nelson Muntz style as you demonstrate time and again just how weak American snowflake culture really is.
Hugs & Kisses, 张殿李
Read George Polti’s The 36 Dramatic Situations. It’s a list of plot elements that have a snappy title, a list of participants in the plot element, a brief discussion of how it works, and then (unfortunately dated) references to dramas that used them.
Using this when building a world, or a campaign, or a local setting, lets you quickly set up a bunch of conflicts (ideally with interlaced participants so that single NPCs (or PCs) can be in different roles in different dramatic situations. Then you just let the events flow logically, and as the dramatic situations get resolved you get a plot. PCs can interfere with these dramatic situations and thus have an impact on resulting plots even if the overall setting is far larger than they are.
For depth in world-building I use a rule I call “Y-cubed”. (I got it from somewhere else but can’t recall the source anymore.)
For every detail you make, you ask the question “Why” three times.
So a village the characters have reached stop all work every 77 days for a festival. Why? It celebrates an ascended local hero who saved the village from a magical blight. Why 77 days? It took 77 days for effort for the blight to be defeated. … And so on.
This is a rapid way to both build depth in your setting quickly, as well as inspire possible mysteries and intrigue for investigation later.
A slight modification works also for giving NPCs depth.
To clarify for any pseudo intellectual who happens to be reading:
“<X> is true for <reason> you utter idiot” is not an example of the ad hominem fallacy.
“<X> is true because you’re an utter idiot” is an example of the ad hominem fallacy.
Glad to be of service.
Have you considered taking a communications course so you don’t sound like a pretentious, obfuscating jackass?
Eschew gratuitous obfuscation. (See what I mean?)
In AI alone, we lead the world.
*Deep Seek has entered the chat.*
There is a certain crowd that seems to insist on there being only One True Way to play RPGs, and that is the dungeon crawl (or sometimes they’ll also permit the hex crawl to join that list).
Before I click, is this another One True Way video?
Any of the 1PG games.
Technically speaking you’d have to say they did war crimes by modern standards.
A lot of what you describe wasn’t actually criminal at the time, see. It was called “war”.
Doesn’t make it any less horrific, mind.
You seem nice.
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