A few months ago @/iammattsanders and I started making a concerted effort to play as many different games as possible - and, where possible, to play them with other designers.

The aim of this was largely just because we wanted to play games - that's obvious, right? - but also we wanted to treat it sort of like a reading group, where we'd pull these things apart and figure out how and why they did what they did.

What works, what doesn't, how do we *define* whether something works - if it doesn't is it a failure of the system or is it just a reflection of what we personally want in games, etc.

Also what can we steal, of course.

An informal test we developed early on, that was entirely a reflection of our (mostly Matt's) preferred playstyle, was this: how easy does this game make it for me to use an improvised weapon and have that feel like a good decision?

(I guess this is going to be a long thread, but I don't know. I'm thinking aloud and don't know where this is heading or if there's a point to it. I'd tag it as ChopShop except that tag intimidates me because everyone on it is brilliant. Anyway.)

What I picked up on fairly quickly is that the more rules around combat and equipment a game has, the less likely it is for grabbing an improvised weapon to feel like an "optimal" choice, and that makes it less fun.

Something like AiME, with it's 5e base, doesn't make this satisfying. The rules exist for doing this stuff, but they're interacted with so infrequently that very few GMs know them off the top of their head. This leads to one of two scenarios.

Thread continues here because I broke it like a fool https://twitter.com/pangalactic/status/1308665340176601089?s=20