So I wanted to try a dungeon crawl with the Pool, for a couple of reasons. One is that in general, I want to see how simple a rules system you can get to “do the job”, in a satisfying way; another is I just wanted to play around with the Pool and see what I could get it to do.
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A group of us have been discussing underground environments over at the Adept Play Discord server, and some interesting insights and questions have been raised. We arrived at a critical mass of comments where it seemed prudent to move the discussion over to this site for the sake of deepening (pun intended) the discussion, widening the audience, and preserving the ideas for posterity.
I've mentioned that I'm not skilled in bringing role-playing to kids. I've done it a fair amount - for instance, all the way back in 1986, with Mentzer's D&D, when I was working at a neighborhood center. But I don't have any special techniques or insights about it as a specific task, and as a father, I don't think I've done a very good job of "bringing them up role-playing" as I've seen many do, or at least present themselves as doing on social media.
The one thing I regret is not making up twenty characters across seven game titles and launching into fervent play right away. This was so much fun.
"Everyone knows" what sandbox means. Except that it was a term 'ported into table-top role-playing from another medium and adopted as fashion rather than substance, so no, I don't. Talk is cheap, whiskey costs money, and let's see if this is a thing, and if so, how many things, and if so in a given case, whether it's something you really want to play in.
I’m spacing out the discussion of Tor’s project post by post, because it’s in such an early stage that each chat we have turns into a big block, or stage, of the process. If I’m not mistaken, this one is pretty much the turning point from “playing D&D 5th edition on purpose” to “his own actual game using the 5th edition OGL.”
The dungeon, which in this particular spin we're calling vortices, is a dead psionic guy's mind. For three characters who got their asses kicked, they did in fact revise and re-set the entire premise of my setup, through a number of roll-requiring actions, some of them judicious and some not-entirely-on-purpose.