In my experience when I’ve been playing any system for a long time and my players say “hey do something different” they are almost always looking for something very different from what we are all playing. I’ve spent the most amount of time playing Mage the Ascension in my rpg career, eventually my current group was hey Mage is getting a bit stale, let’s do another game. So we did some Vampire the Masquerade, and it was too close in flavor to Mage. So we started playing some Pathfinder and that was the breath of fresh air we were looking for. Eventually we did switch back to mage, but one of my players decided to run their own campaign set in Star Wars which was a ton of fun.

So forgive me for using my own experience of when my players have asked to play something different my understanding is they are looking for something more drastic that going from one Tolkien inspired fantasy game to another Tolkien inspired fantasy game or from one modern Gothic punk game with magic to another modern Gothic punk game with fangs.

I’m getting tired of eating Mac and Cheese all the time “have you tried Caccio e Pepe?”

It’s still pasta and cheese.

If someone asked me for something other than dnd to play, I’d imagine they’re looking to get out of the tolkein flavored medieval fantasy genre into something different and recommend something like World of Darkness, modern supernatural urban fantasy for political intrigue and melodramatics, or Blades in the Dark, victorian industrial fantasy heists. Not “grittier Tolkien flavored medieval fantasy.”

Imo WoD I feel gets the right balance of RP and streamlined combat with optional additional rules if they are needed. I’m also generally a firm believer in combat means all other forms of diplomacy has failed. I also love that no matter how strong you are, everyone has 7 points of health they can take (but there are ways of getting around that especially for mages)

And for all the good and bad that the 5e splats that Paradox is putting out, the “3 rounds and call it” philosophy of combat is something I enjoy immensely.

Yeah, gender being a social construct doesn’t mean everyone everywhere just suddenly becomes genderless androgynous blobs, we still express our gender in the ways we want to express them.

For example High heels, sheer leggings, long curly hair, and a flowy skirt and poofy blouse adorned with shiny bits. Am I describing the style dress of women today or the style of dress of 17th century French kings?

Certainly coffee houses do have historic basis in our own reality but the highly commercialized omnipresent franchises with extensive supply chains like IRL Starbucks would definitely be a bit more anachronistic, especially in an adveture friendly world where monsters and bandits are waiting outside the walls of the city waiting to ambush cargo shipments.

Something like that probably wouldn’t have been even remotely possible until the age of Mercantilism well after the medieval period gave way to the Renaissance and eventually the age of exploration.

As a DM dice are there to make noise behind the screen and raise tension. They’re a psychological tool as much as they are a randomizer.

Personally I play a lot of World of Darkness games, which runs on dice pools, so if I can just keep obviously adding more and more dice to a pool, recount once or twice and roll to really sell the illusion that they may be in for something a lot bigger and scarier than they are. Or just roll a handful of dice as moments are going on, give a facial reaction and let that simmer under the surface for a while.

This sounds a lot like Star Lord’s situation with Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy 2.

Do my eyes decieve me? An honest to god Mage the Ascension meme???

Did… did I get hit by the Mandela effect? Like I can hear the interaction between Omega and Doc in my head playing out.

Point taken, but they also still had the resources and people to make that many charts.

Well Rollmaster has multiple authors/designers and the benefit of 43 years of accumulated writing and knowledge.

It goes you, the dirt, the worms inside the dirt, popo’s stool, kami, and popo. Any questions maggots?

He laughed when I said 5.

I was more intending Mage the Ascension but Ars Magica works too. They were both initially created by the same company

When the Order of Hermes takes design cues from the Society of Ether.

I think the writers of Mage the Ascension got it best when referring to DnD as a wargame with role-playing tacked on top.

So much of DnD the dnd rulebook and printed material is focused around combat and getting from one combat encounter to the next one.

We save our carcasses and use them for a stock that goes into the gravy for the next time we do a turkey dinner. We’ll usually do a big turkey dinner 2 or 3 times each year including Thanksgiving.

Odd, everything I’m coming across is saying broths are made from meat where stocks are primarily made from bones. Both use vegetables as part of the aromatics.