Codifying "Player Agency" is bad.

Random Wizard's post about simplifying calculations got me thinking about the d20 mechanic.

Using the same mechanic for everything (the d20-roll-high) is one of a few things that I took away from the d20 system as a good idea.

 I still think that they let the whole feat and skill thing get out of hand, though, with 3.0/5. They tried to make everything a skill or feat instead of keeping it fast and loose. Codifying too many things can actually rob the players of "agency".

Fair and flexible adjudication of the game is a better plan. And it makes the person running the game feel less like a robot and more like a participant in something fun, a shared experience.

My Secret Shame (well, one of many)

Your results:
You are Will Riker

Will Riker 85% Spock 72% James T. Kirk (Captain) 65% Chekov 60% Geordi LaForge 60% Worf 60% Deanna Troi 60% An Expendable Character (Redshirt) 60% Mr. Scott 55% Jean-Luc Picard 55% Leonard McCoy (Bones) 45% Data 41% Mr. Sulu 40% Uhura 35% Beverly Crusher 15%

At times you are self-centered but you have many friends. You love many women, but the right woman could get you to settle down.

Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Test

Tekumel

I've acquired a copy of Gardasiyal: Adventures on Tekumel, and I've been considering trying out a game of Tekumel to see what it's like.  I've been doing a lot of reading about the setting and what people who've run it have to say.

It does sound interesting, so a long-time gaming buddy and I have got the notion to go through character generation as a test drive.  I've also been reading Dave Morris' Tirikelu rules for Tekumel, they look concise and seem to have the flavour of the game built-in, perhaps they'll work better than Gardaiyal.  We'll find out soon.

Fizzle

The fall gaming thing fizzled out after a few weeks, largely my own fault -- I simply didn't have the energy to put into it.  We played a multi-session one-shot of Stuart Robertson's Citadel of Evil mini-module using the Swords & Wizardry White Box rules.

Everyone had a lot of fun and it was great to rediscover the joys of playing an rpg that fit into less pages than the character generation section of many "modern" rpgs.  Seyoung, my wife, had never played a role playing game before; she had a lot of fun and thought she'd enjoy more.

We had started generating characters for Traveller (Classic) and were ready to begin, but it kind of got lost pre-Christmas.  I'll have to see about firing it up again sometime during the summer for a session or two.