Notices by 🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦 (zdl@gamerplus.org)

@GayDeceiver A hundred?

The constant, insidious looming fear of "inevitable" nuclear destruction of my youth was mostly forgotten only 20 years later.

@Printdevil @Taskerland @zozo Powered by the Apocalypse. A set of games built to a specific attitude that treats as a new discovery the notion that you can have games that aren't based on wargames but put, instead, the fiction first.

You know, like *Maelstrom*/*Story Engine* from the '90s. Or conversations held in the pages of *Alarums & Excursions* since the late '80s or possibly even earlier.

@Printdevil @Taskerland @zozo Well earlier games were more oriented toward "simulation" because they came from wargames. But I, too, came at them from the "drama flake" side of things and found the wargamey stuff boring, favouring the character and story stuff (often to the frustration of the players who were optimizers).

It took nearly two decades before games started coming out that explicitly parted ways with the wargames roots and that's when I came into my own!

@Printdevil @Taskerland @zozo LoC I could never warm up to, and MM&M was a distant dream to me.

LoC was pretty early in the scheme of things: 1984. It was certainly not as wargamey as a dungeon crawler, but it wasn't really a "fiction first" game either. It was at the beginnings of the move away from wargames, but still dragged a lot of assumptions along like character growth by defeating foes, levels, etc.

Tom Moldvay tried hard, but wasn't quite able to leave D&D behind him.

🧵 (1/n)

@Printdevil @Taskerland @zozo For the earliest pure break from wargames that I know of, the Maelstrom game (later Story Engine) from Hubris was a good example. It had no stats. No skills. No levels. Combat wasn't resolved in incremental rounds. Instead entire *scenes* were resolved through cooperative effort on each "side". (It gets a bit more complicated than that with cut scenes, etc. but only a bit.)

It is the first absolute severing of wargames that I know of.

🧵 (2/2)

@Printdevil @Taskerland @zozo D20 didn't kill my interest in RPGs, but it killed my interest in the industry.

Rather like PbtA is doing now, actually.

@Printdevil @Taskerland @zozo That was the end game for me, too. I occasionally pick up new rules if people I trust recommend them to me. (But even this backfires. C.f. my picking up Savage Worlds on strong recommendations only to wind up actively hating it.)