@Canageek Designated stealthy characters (rogues, &c) are inherently problematic. They split the party by design, & if they get into trouble, they are screwed. If sneaking & getting intel is part of your setting, make is so every character can sneak. (My GURPS GM mandates this)

@Canageek Punishing people for taking flashy options is bad game design in most cases. Doing big, flashy things is part of the fantasy for most people, and every class should get to do it.

@Canageek When there is a husband/wife couple, the wife is a better player about 75% of the time.

@Canageek Learning how to deal with bad players is an important skill, and we put too much advice on 'kick them out of the group'. This isn't always viable: They might come with a (better playing) spouse, be new to the game, be a player at a convention....

@Canageek Skill based games are easier for new players then abstract ones. The easiest thing to tell a new player is "Tell me what you want to do and I'll tell you which skill to roll against" and you can always add new skills.

@Canageek The OSR was a mistake as it focused all the traditional-rules lite segment of the gaming sphere on fixing/recreating old, bad ways of doing things instead of learning from the past and doing better.

@Canageek Narrative games tend to be one trick ponies which is why there is a new trendy one every year.

@Canageek GURPS is actually easier to learn then D&D3.X/pathfinder

@Canageek The ratio of games written by writers/artists and those written by people with a math/science background is too far in the direction of the authors. (I don't say there are too many author written games, since I don't want less of them, but I want more by people who know math)

@Canageek If you don't put thought into the math behind your game, you are going to get a bad game. Playtesting isn't a substituent for doing some statistics and seeing if your system works how you think it will work.

Ex: D&D3.0 where CR didn't work, and where wizards would always win in a fight with a barbarian, since the barbarian could never make a will save vs a high level spell.

@Canageek Call of Cthulhu has a much better system then people give it credit for, if a bit crufty.

@Canageek d%/Roll Under is the best system for new players, since it is immediately obvious how it works, and everyone knows how to do %s.

@Canageek Fudging rolls/never fudging rolls are both fine ways to play as long as you are open about which you are doing.

@Canageek Killing a player at their first game session makes you a bad DM, and a bad member of the hobby as they will likely leave the hobby and never play again. We lost players from Living Greyhawk this way, and I know at least one person who would never try RPGs with me for this reason.

@Canageek @Canageek
Exception: you are playing Paranoia.
Possible exception: you are playing Call of Cthulhu and they know what to expect from the setting.

@gcupc @Canageek Fair points. I'd argue then that you want to make sure they have a fun, dramatic, memorable death in those cases.

@Canageek @Canageek
Yes, absolutely. No clone should die in a way that is less than hilarious.

@Canageek @Canageek Fun fact: if you take a die and roll it as many times as it has sides, there is around a 63.2% chance that you will roll at least one 1.

@signalstation @Canageek CRONCH CRONCH!

@USBloveDog As someone still in grad school, I disagree. I've gone to week-long schools and come out much better at a specific task then when I went in. (Crystallography, nuclear physics).

A graduate course can be as short as six weeks, at 6-9 hours of class plus twice that outside of class work per week.

Standard university semesters is 10 weeks long.

If my life depended on learning something like in most RPGs, I'd probably learn even faster.

@USBloveDog US Cost Guard bit camp is 8 weeks, and even the longest US military bays training is only 12 weeks.

@Canageek In retrospect, you’re right about leveling specific skills can be done in a matter of weeks. I really was thinking of whole character level -ups (whether they're some constant added to each stay or a holistic synergy multiplier) often seem to break character-building by feeling dropped-in simply because the game mechanics demand it (I'm also not a fan of zero to hero storylines in general).

Any IRL holistic leveling for me occurs long after the specific training.

@USBloveDog Ah, I've been playing Gurps as of late, so I think of the two as being related. You'd like our rules: You have to be using a skill to raise it, and you can put at most one point into an ability each time (such as strength, into) so it takes a long time to get the 5-10 points to improve those.