The cast of the videogame Loco Roco

Seems familiar...

Mate, I'm WAY too lazy to tell my own story. I crowdsource that to the players, much easier.

In fairness, you did ask this at nearly 11pm, which by most people's standards is pretty late.

And that leads to burnout.
But this is a very specific Trad GM style, very far from a universal law, right?

If you're relying on the rules to adjudicate the physics, there's no need to make decisions on that, leaving the GM more energy to concentrate on other aspects of the session.
GMs running like this often get frustrated if the rules aren't doing that well. Takes more effort they don't enjoy.

I suspect this is around desired play experience and what the GM wants the rules to do.
Clearly there's no universal answer there, but you know there's a type of GM who's attitude is that making the game fun is the GM's job and want rules which "don't get in the way of the story"

How're you finding Urban Shadows? I picked it up recently and I like it a lot, but it seems to have a shit load going on at various levels and I haven't quite got to the point where I can see how it works in play.

Yeah, making a weird noise when you read the last part seems to be a common thing.

bsky.app/profile/tact...

At the point Trail of Cthulhu released in 2008, there was a sense among many that CoC had been largely unchanged for a quarter century and just wasn't what they were looking for in a system any more.

Combined with the d20 glut, with some publishers releasing d20 versions of their main games and many more releasing thinly disguised d20 versions of other people's games, it gave a lot of people an understanding that a setting and a system didn't need to be tied together.

Speaking as an observer during that period rather than any kind of industry insider, but that mid 2000s era was very very much one where a lot of the RPG community started thinking more seriously about systems and mechanics and reflecting more on how they impact play.

Odd pick, I personally enjoyed Only Heaven a lot more.
Which I also haven't listened to in a decade other than Strangel which is somehow on a playlist I created ages ago and still like.
Something something says more about me something?

They're this baffling weird thing aren't they?
Like, wtf were they thinking?

Which sounds good until you realise that a person walking down the street and accidentally bumping their shoulder with a stationary bus would take enough damage to reduce them to a fine red mist.

Good lord that sounds daft.

I'm weirdly reminded of going through the abysmal Wraeththu RPG with @malcolmcraig.bsky.social one afternoon years ago and noticing that collision damage was calculated as a function of the closing speed times the combined mass of the objects colliding.

Outside is where bears live.

Twat.

A very fluffy black and white cat lying on his back.

Apparently throwing up on the rug is exhausting?

Disappointing that this isn't about sick guitar riffs.
But shark films also rock?
I dunno, too tired to be witty.

I think one of the first things you realise when people start talking about RPG stuff is that if it's even remotely possible to misinterpret something, someone will.
And then they'll use the term to mean something different to what it was intended to and that'll spread.

I hate the term too, mainly for the reason that it allows people to project the wrong meaning too easily and there's (obviously) no authoritative ISO standard definition people can look up in a dictionary.
See also "fiction first".
Useful concepts rendered less useful by poor language.

Remember:
She's fine.

The colours made me think this was the new Lord of Change model TBH.

Closure!
I've been on the edge of my seat for 3 hours in case you got stains.

Call of Cthulhu is the best game, right? Everyone says so. And everyone knows the rules for that are awful, so as a good GM you know not to use them, right?
So since the rules don't help, you don't use them, why bother even reading them? You know how to run a good game. After all, you're special.

I think a lot of that stems from the toxic "system doesn't matter/you just need a good GM" stuff.
I mean, you know how to run a good game, right? You're a good GM, one of the special people with the ineffable talent that makes games great, which you can't learn from a book, right?

There's a more nuanced version of this which is inevitable in some games with subsystems which might not be presented as optional, but feel bolted on.
And it's not necessarily that people are deliberately deciding not to use them so much as forgetting those subsystems exist in the heat of play.

Ron Swanson explains that thean who kills him will know what the weird symbols mean.

A very fluffy black and white cat.

It's actually not a trap, this idiot genuinely loves having his tummy rubbed.