Mailbag Catchup Q2 2024

Yochai & Brad answer a whole mess of of mailbag questions!

Thanks to Bobby McElver for the show's music and bumpers!
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Chapters

• 0:00 How do you deal with currency, price lists and other "mundane" elements in your games? This seems to be an important element in a lot of OSR discourse (Skerples' blog comes to mind, or the frequent proposal of using silver standards in lieu of gold pieces
• 7:00 Are there any aspects of gameplay, or types of procedures you are interested in, or currently attempting to implement more in your games?
• 11:00 What is your threshold for too much gonzo stuff in an adventure? At what point do you say, this is too dumb, even for me?
• 15:15 What are your favorite ways modules work lore into the adventure? Random tables? NPC motivations? Art?
• 17:46 I’m curious if you can think of a good adventure (or other resource) for a beginner learning how to run Factions. I’d never heard of Factions in rpgs before I started following the OSR. Looking back, I’d run them in some form or another, but not neatly or
• 19:12 What's the weirdest place you've played an RPG?
• 21:30 What is something you haven't seen "done right" in a game yet? Do you think it is possible?
• 23:19 There is a lot of theory about what makes a good dungeon or adventure, but I see considerably less theory about what makes a good setting. What, in your opinion, are the fundamentals for a good setting? Are they just adventure writing principles on a larg
• 30:35 Does OSR lend itself uniquely to a kind of player nihilism about character lives and how do you work against that, if you do at all?
• 34:30 What genre of games to you like to dip into if you’re not doing old school exploration/dungeon crawling? Or do you mix it up at all?
• 42:30 Do you have any tips for understanding how an adventure would play at your tables without prepping for it? Your conclusions in this regard are a big portion of your reviews, but do you have any specific processes or techniques you em
• 43:40 Do you have any tips for creating interactive factions and faction relationships? Or do you have any favorites? I'm always chasing the high I felt when I first read Symbaroum and saw how cool the factions and their relationships were and h
• 50:24 Outside of actually running adventures, do you have any table rituals or procedues you go through each and every session? Do you do "roses and thorns"
• 54:40 As a GM I really need to convince myself of the "reality" of the shared world in order to run a good game. If the world feels real to me, then I can make up rulings and new stuff on the fly far easier. What stuff helps a game world feel more real to you?
• 56:12 Since you've been involved in the OSR scene, what's the biggest shift or change you've observed in the way adventures are designed, written, or run?
• 1:08:10 Do you have any advice about playing by post? This is probably my best option for getting a group together, and I was curious about any challenges that could pop up. W