Having played Monster of the Week, I think I agree with you about PbtA systems. They’re fun, but I tend to get a little bored with them after a few sessions, especially since I like to make characters who don’t really fit into any of the playbooks. The best fit of a playbook at character creation rarely has more than a few plays I would want to spend experience points on.

I will say, though, that I like the experience system in PbtA games. It does a good job of helping players feel like they accomplished something each session.

I hate to be pedantic (this is a lie), but I’m pretty sure Worlds Without Number is actually the fantasy version of Stars Without Number, since Stars came out first. This doesn’t change your point (also I agree with you) and I’m really not sure that this information is helpful in any way, but here we are.

Thanks! That system mostly came out of a home rule I use in pretty much every system I run. Very few of the mainstream TTRPGs seem to point out that turns can be of nearly any length so long as every player gets one.

Sorry for the late reply, I got distracted with some real life stuff. Basically, it’s a classless system that focuses on skills and formalizing a lot of the house rules I like to use when I run pretty much any RPG. I don’t think it’s going to make too many waves, and I’ve definitely reinvented the wheel a few times, but it’s also kind of just a personal project that I’m to have actually finished and put out into the world. I’ve tried to beef up the support for exploration and social encounters compared to DND 5e, but I also wanted to make sure mechanics were somewhat unified and streamlined. No clue whether or not I succeeded, I sure did enjoy writing it.

I do not use CR to build encounters, and I use milestone experience, but in 4e, a minion was usually worth 1/4 to 1/2 the experience of a monster with equivalent stats.

This might be in the 5e DMG and I’m just forgetting, but I’m a big fan of the 10 minute exploration turn while the party goes through dungeons. I find that it helps things move faster and helps players feel like they’re getting enough time in the spotlight during the exploration phase. Rather than figuring out how far they can move in 10 minutes, I just allow characters either to move into an adjacent room (provided there is an unblocked passage to do so) or an action inside of the room. Actions in the room take the whole 10 minutes, but I usually let it slide if a player wants to perform a short sequence of actions to achieve a single result, the whole sequence getting represented by one roll if necessary.

To streamline combat, I have ported over minions from 4e (Matt Colville and I actually converged on this, I had been doing it since I switched to 5e and didn’t find his video on it for years) and a modified version of the coup de grace rules. Minions are monsters with full stats and attacks but they die in a single hit, no matter how much damage they were dealt. For the modified coup de grace, if a player character deals half or more of a monsters HP in a single hit, even during normal combat, that monster dies immediately. Anything that gets the monsters off the field before they get boring really, since it allows me to throw out large waves of enemies that only take a few minutes to fight since many of them go down in one hit. I run a fairly heroic game of d&d so letting the players plow through enemies helps create the vibe I want during the game.

This is really cool! I’ve been running a game for high schoolers for the past year or so with similar goals in helping the students learn social and emotional skills. The group was organized by their high school social worker and I’m just some person who thinks it’s a cool idea and is willing to run the game, so I’m probably going to get the book mentioned in the article and see what I can use from it in my own game. Also this article is great because now I can just send it to people whenever I try to explain what exactly the point of playing d&d with a group of teenagers every week accomplishes.

I’ve played starwars FFG and while the dice system is interesting, my group struggled to find a good way to simulate the dice we needed without spending money and none of us felt like buying the physical dice for a few sessions of one-shots. We ended up using the method in the rules for converting numbered dice results into the symbols, but that slowed down play a lot. Granted, this was also several years ago so maybe someone has made a free tool since then that everyone in my group can figure out by now.

All of that said, my friend who tried running the game said several times each session that he wasn’t sure how to resolve the results of the dice. Some checks didn’t have an obvious advantage or complication to add, and it didn’t seem like there was too much guidance on advantages and complications in the rulebook he was using. Maybe that’s just an experience thing, but all of us coming from d&d, it was a bit of an adjustment.