Modiphius Star Trek and Reinforcing Genre in Roleplaying
A middling dive into my favourite fiction and its most recent TTRPG adaptation.
My old joke is that I design games not for GMs at their best—a good GM on a good night can run a paper bag well—but for GMs on the early morning game of the Sunday of a con, hungover, unsure of what their name is, let alone orphan rules. The point of a system, to me, was always to offer encouraging guardrails to keep everyone on-task and in-genre, and incentives to offer maybe something the GM wouldn’t think of, guidelines that take the game in exciting, but still relevant directions. Ultimately, a good system should mechanically reinforce its own themes and genre conventions—assuming it's a genre game.
read more of James thoughts on his blog
My old joke is that I design games not for GMs at their best—a good GM on a good night can run a paper bag well—but for GMs on the early morning game of the Sunday of a con, hungover, unsure of what their name is, let alone orphan rules. The point of a system, to me, was always to offer encouraging guardrails to keep everyone on-task and in-genre, and incentives to offer maybe something the GM wouldn’t think of, guidelines that take the game in exciting, but still relevant directions. Ultimately, a good system should mechanically reinforce its own themes and genre conventions—assuming it's a genre game.
read more of James thoughts on his blog