If you know anything about the reviewer he's married to Leigh Alexander of the Great Gaming Jihad fame and is primarily a board game enthusiast that used to be involved in a very popular youtube show called Shut Up and Sit Down that, until he left, was co-hosted with Matt Lees, a total fucking giant nosed faggot. Quinns ain't that bad all things considered but his tastes are firmly in the "experience generator" territory of games so anything that lets the theatre kids really have at it is up his alley and as result he would not be the first person I rush to hear discuss TTRPGs, even if I sort of respect his opinion generally.
I didn't know any of that. Thanks. I don't why ex-GamerGate people keep coming up (I follow the SBI and Steller Blade dramas and familiar names keep cropping up in those too).
I thought it was suspicious that a channel that started 2 months ago and only has 3 videos had over 100k views each. As said in a later post, in other videos he shits on DnD for being "problematic" due to having racial stats (something that was removed iirc) and alignments, and complains that a mech combat game is all about combat and not romance or drama out of the cockpit.
As for the game itself, like I said, his review makes it sound like hipster bullshit, but I like some of the concepts such as the a-typical classes. It's also interesting to see a stand alone dungeon crawl game.
I don't know if I ever asked on KF, but when I was a teen, me and some friends played a self contained dungeon crawl game book that played like the Fighting Fantasy books, but with a DM narrating the game. I wanted to track down the game, but I don't remember what it's called. All I really remember was the dungeon entrance was hidden in a tree.
Kind of makes me want to make a system that leans into this by turning the game into a roguelike. No levels, only gear and skills partially passed on from run to run. Could be a fun little game.
A friend has wants to do the same, but from the other direction. He wants to run Tomb of Horrors as a groundhog day game. Each time the party wipes, they start back at town. They lose all their gear, but keep their knowledge and experience.
I'm more okay with upfront lore dumps but I'd prefer to not have to do much - my go-to solution so far was to theme all the names in the area based on a work of fiction that my players might not be familiar with (using 3 kingdoms names with a group that hasn't read Romance, or Fire Emblem names on a non-weeb group). Not an obvious reference that takes you out of it, easy enough for me to remember that I don't have to have notes.
I have two recommendations then. Sorry to beat a horse.
My first bit of advice is to buy or pirate Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master. The key points are all free on YouTube or on his blog, but the book saves you digging.
Eberron is one of my favourite fantasy settings in part because everything presented is gaming material. Instead of the lore being about lines of kings and geopolitics, every element is designed to get you adventuring and just reading it will fill your mind with adventure ideas. It also doesn't present concrete answers to things. What caused The Mourning (a magic nuke that wiped out a country)? Doesn't say, that's for you to answer, or ignore, as you see fit. Powerful NPCs are deliberately constrained or have questionable motives, so it's up to the players to be the heroes. What's more, it's an easy setting to explain since you don't need much of a lore dump, and even then you only explain what is needed.
Which is my second bit of advice. Only lore dump about things the player needs to know. And if you're extra lazy, don't flesh out the lore beyond what you might need next session.
Sounds interesting, I might have to take look at the rule set. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to run after my two games finish.
Tiny d6 is good but it has problems.
My main advice that would be triple underlined and written in gold pen is don't buy the revised books. Mecha and Monsters and the original Tiny Frontiers are the best ones of the bunch. Add in the free fan Star Wars expansion (just google Tiny Frontiers Homebrew) and you're set. Tiny Frontiers Mecha and Monsters
Evolved has glaring errors, like the description of the helicopter being bold red text that says "description goes here". Tiny Frontiers
Revised has slightly expanded space ship rules but not much else of value, and even cuts the mech rules. It's poorly edited with the same traits being included twice under different names.
If you've played the Arkham board games, they're basically that. You roll 1-3 d6, a 5 or 6 is a success. There's little to no gear or level progression, so they work best as one shots or short campaigns.
What I like is that simplicity though. You hand them a list of 20-30 traits, and ask them to pick 3. There's no autism required for things like ship building or mech building. Again it's just a list of traits and they pick three. In mech and monsters they introduce chassis that have x number of systems in 4 different categories, but it's basically the same. I've run a bunch of one shots in the system from Bubblegum Crisis to Star Trek. The lack of granularity hurts the depth of the game, but it plays extremely fast, and when I just want to throw together a quick sci-fi game, it works great.
