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Friday, January 22, 2021

Random Links for Friday 1/22/2021

- Who came up with Rule Zero?

The Origins of Rule Zero

- This is a well-thought out campaign by a guy who does that:

The Lifebane Campaign

- Miscellanea: Insurrections, Ancient and Modern (And Also Meet the Academicats)

"Moreover, One thing about coup attempts like this in the ancient world: they all look farcical, unless they work."

I was just talking about this with a friend about coups in general - the successful ones seem surprisingly lucky and often successful despite themselves; the unsuccessful ones seem foolish and stupid. It's a detail worth putting into games, really - all too often in fiction, coups are extremely well-organized and are pulled off with great skill. The victims of the coup are usually deluded, foolish, and mistakenly self-assured. For failed coups, reverse the situation entirely. Reality is much messier, at best. It adds versimilitude to a world if you include mistakes and luck, and it makes it seem reasonable to the PCs to try something of the kind if you don't need to be the Mission: Impossible crew to succeed.

Not to take away from the ugliness and real, lethal threat of the recent events in the U.S., but here we are. On Dungeon Fantastic, it's about gaming or it's not blogged.

- Rob programmed out the The Central Mechanic of Tabletop RPGs.

- I revised our grappling rules a little bit. Mostly, for clarity - the document I had was written to explain the rules to another GURPS GM, not to my players. But also to reflect a small but significant change to how we run things. Overally, the changes made it easier to read and easier to run. I have another revision in mind - another clarity issue, not a rules change. Ultimately, it's the core of Technical Grappling but with no frills, and lots of opportunities for GM judgement calls. I'm not sure if I could ever post them - they contain way too much SJG-owned material. I'm not sure I could ever sell them - Doug has his won, and SJG uses Doug's own. But at least we can play with them more easily now.

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