Dear Seth, thank you very much. Absolutely wonderful. Your integrity warms my heart. I wish Mrs S and you happy holidays! Greetings from Sweden. Alicia.

To springboard off of the conspiracy theorist type, it really is important that any mystery your party plays through has ample evidence with which to solve it. While a great mystery novel might work with scarce evidence to unwind a crime with motives spanning a dozen characters, the party has to all be convinced that the body at the bottom of the stairs was pushed and didn't just trip, so add an egregiously extra stab wound in their back even if it doesn't make sense for a "smart" perpetrator to do. No red herring should be more than an interaction deep to prevent wasting time, and to make up for it the effort might contribute to something else. Perhaps the owner of the chemical factory that hired a rival investigator had truly done no wrongdoing and really wanted to be sure if their interests are threatened by this, but had found evidence or speculation towards the real culprit that the party can compare with their own findings for a better picture. Also, there should be the implicit rule that the case is contained to the town or city it took place in, and that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It might be more "epic" to have the main suspect hiding out in some villa in Guatemala to avoid drawing attention to their powerful motive, but unless you find witness testimony that a guy with that description was at the scene and feasibly had time to get to the airport, it's more fair to everyone involved that it be some other person entirely, or at least a clumsy hitman you can squeeze a confession and transaction record out of.

Yup, intuitive is subjective. If you play D&D percentages aren't intuitive. With some people it's almost a panic scene. Is the chance of rain tomorrow 12 in 20 or 60%? Are you a hundred percent sure or 20 out of 20 sure. If you play percentile games AC isn't intuitive. It works both was.

Wait, if you don't make much reviewing RPGs, how are you able to pay Mike, Todd and Dweebles? Don't tell me you're shafting them.

I think everyone can agree on "Fuck Hasbro," though.

Wow, one of your best RPG Philosophy videos, Seth! So well written, full of insights and so funny! I truly enjoy your authenticity and truthful observations. My favourite of your vids are the war stories and campaign diaries! 💯

Hi Seth, can this be played solo? Looking for a pre-published adventure that I can play solo

In today's landscape of easy access to publishing and saturation of AI slop, curation of RPG content is super important to not waste your time! Not to mention everything on DTRPG alwyas has 5 stars with 1-2 scores no matter how hard it sucks. My favorite reviewer is Bryce Lynch. I don't mind "read reviews" that much. A good GM can salvage anything and make players have fun. They really gotta account for "how much prep is this? Is this easy to run at the table? Would I need to modify the story? Is it cool?" Most of that stuff you can just tell before wasting 10+ hours of your life and close to that much for other people. For example: Most 5e adventures are beloved by the community even though we're talking abut triple digit time investment since they're so big and that they are utter misery to navigate and reference, not to mention their super linear nature. The GM just powered through since they didn't know better and everyone had a good time.

enlightening , as always

Would a PC with life-preserving cyber implants die immediately again upon revival due to having holes in their organs and then be stuck in an eternal loop of dying?

100% agree about GMs being able to tell by reading - 40 years GMing experience... and playing new systems has routinely surprised me in ways that reading never indicated. A good example is the Alien RPG - when it came out I was starting to get tired of Free League's system. I played it because my group was excited about it - and the stress mechanic turned out to be my all-time favourite synthesis of mechanics and theme - and that was not readily apparent on the page, when it seems like a compromise on the conditions system from previous games in the same engine.

I just ran the Tomb of the Lizard King as written! My players killed it!!!! My party was 7th level average. You didn't mention his three coffins!

Thanks for the interesting video Seth. I sort of always considered your channel to be a GM focused tips & methods channel. I bought Traveller & Cyberpunk based on your reviews, not because you like them, but because you give great teaching overviews for your modules and rulebooks, including Traveller & Cyberpunk. I finish your reviews with a solid idea of what to expect when you buy a product and how best to run it at the table. If memory serves, you've given good reviews to modules you thought had glaring flaws, but you give the skinny on how best to shore up said flaws, and you give so much of your home made GM resources to the community so that their game will be as successful as possible. Sometimes I feel like I don't even need to buy the product, you can run the scenario based solely from your "reviews". That's like if Roger Ebert wrote a badass song based on a movie he was reviewing, while teaching you to direct film. I feel like your reviews typically function in ways that go beyond the scope of criticism. Does that put you more in the theory crafting sector of dungeontube? I'm just stoked for more from this channel! Also, super funny sketches to boot. I think I'm legit a better GM for your channel, much gratitude. Happy holidays & hope you have a fruitful & productive new year. Greetings from Regina.

HI Seth totally agree with you you need to play to have a full understanding not just read rules .. as GM and player of over 48 years .... Question one game for me stands out as excellent to read and play that has the best GM guide I know MOTHERSHIP I know you must get loads of requests but this is well worth a look Kev

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Hot take on the topic of unbiased reviews: they're a myth. Every single review will be biased, and if a reviewer boasts an unbiased review, that just tells me they're trying to obfuscate their bias, and can't be trusted.

You can review a book without playing it, but you can't review game without playing it. An RPG book is the rules and low for a game, the game itself is what hairballs at the table.

Could you do a video on balancing the game for skill based systems ? Or just systems without CR? Keep up the great work!

I had watched this video 5-6 years ago, but finally just finished playing it the first time. Our DM basically let the party jump to level 3 (down to 5 players at the finale) and even then, it was a challenge. We didn't have Ramny with us and didn't get that fireball foreshadowing. Fortunately, we played as close to RAW as possible with initiative and spell casting times, so we were able to hit the naga spoiling the fireball spell...otherwise it would have been a TPK. Great review and fully agree with your recommendations [after the fact]

Seth, my respect for you has grown immensely. I understand that everybody's gotta eat, but hearing you decry paid sponsorships as shady felt really genuine and just... I don't know, it feels like you're a good guy looking out for us viewers/consumers. I appreciate your integrity, and because integrity ought to be rewarded, I'll try to kick some money your way once I've got a few spare bucks! Maybe it's time to purchase some more of those Jack the NPC Call of Cthulhu dice...

Darnit now I want Mr. Rogers as DM...

It surprises me that so many people don't realize that it's a one-man show. Seth's "not-Seth" voice is still distinctly Seth's voice, and he uses it for every NPC and character that's not-Seth, which makes it painfully obvious...

I'm way late to the party on this one, but on the topic of the "overcorrecting and fudging badly can be very offputting" segment near the end of the video... if it reaches that point, it may genuinely be worth it to stop the game entirely for a few moments and just explain the situation to your players. I've had one or two occasions on both sides of the screen where I've either told players, or the GM for our group has told me, "Hey, listen, I set up this encounter but I made a pretty bad call in balancing it out. This guy has too much {health/damage/stats/armor/etc} and it's clear things are going pretty poorly, so I'm going to step in and adjust his stats a little bit on the fly here and we can pick things up like nothing happened." This has a whole bunch of benefits. For one, it helps to alleviate a lot of frustration that might have been starting to build under the surface; after a few combat rounds in a system they're familiar with, players can definitely get a feel for whether or not they're just grinding their faces against a brick wall, be that from one too many combat rounds without hitting an attack or penetrating armor, taking a little too much damage to be sustainable from every attack, or so on. For two, it helps get the game running again, which is the whole reason everyone's there - you made a mistake, you owned up to it, and you're committing yourself to correcting it in the simplest possible way to get things back on track. For three, it also further deepens that trust and respect environment at the table; when a GM admits that they made a mistake and announces to the group that they're going to try to fix it right then and there, not only does it show a commitment to the game, but also shows respect for the players' intelligence that they can handle knowing things have just been changed in front of them and why, rather than it being stealthily shifted around behind the screen and then suddenly your attacks are punching through armor or you're taking an entire damage die less from every attack.

I am looking forward to your Teatime Adventures review :)

As always, great video!

great video also this has alot of overlap with my hobby of being a kind of video game reviewer as a pet project mostly playing games and making note of some features I found useful or lacking or weirdly hidden away or not implemented very well stuff that could be used for a game developer or indie developer as a kind of general guideline of "this was a useful feature you really want by end game" or "yeah it would of been good to know that 5 hours after spending a lot of time grinding out resources for this car in watchdogs 2 only to find out they have a slightly different one for free as part of a free dlc i could of just downloaded in maybe 30 seconds" or and this is a very recent one with door kickers 2 after installing a mod you need to manfully toggle it in the mods section of the home screen I spent over an hour fiddling with vortex uninstalling manually downloading extracting with 7zip manually copying just to finally get it working right. just having those small notes tends to be rather helpful since I saved a buddy of mine alot of headache when he was trying to remake a simple game and he also made the mistake of flooding the action economy against the player and shooting himself in the foot right out of the gate

@SSkorkowsky Youre about the only reviewer I follow, because you are very honest about them.

I've run both Teatime Adventures and Delta Green, so the cross-over appeal isn't zero. I'll fully admit that it's an unlikely pairing, though :) I'm currently putting together a Verdant Isles/Golarion cross-over game using the rules from Howl of the Wilds to stat-out the animal folk, and I'm really stoked to put PF2e Remaster's subsystems through their paces to capture Teatime Adventure's aura of cozy mystery. I happen to really like their chase subsystem, which will definitely get some play. I'm aiming to answer the question, "what if The Wind in the Willow's was written by Fritz Lieber?" Anyway, never underestimate a cozy ttrpg. They have a smaller audience which means that, more often than not, they were written as a labor of love. I think it's great that you bring up cozy ttrpg's and Delta Green together, because one of the things that I think GMs of dystopian and horror games can really benefit from is mastering the "cozy vibe". Player buy-in is always the biggest bottleneck, but if you want to take a group of horror players and really put the fear of the Old Ones in them, you gotta learn how to make them feel safe. Get them to buy in to the community of npc's they're surrounded by. Let them set some roots down. You've gotta give them something to lose, and a home that they've built is the juiciest of targets. It's an angle that I've seen repeatedly ignored in horror games, even ones like Chronicles of Darkness which has Safe Place and it's splat-specific variants as explicit merits (though, in fairness, VtR 2e's touchstones mechanic really narrow in on this). A lot of horror settings and games are really good at getting the players to places, away from the character's homes, where they can root around and rough-up things without worrying about tracking the mud back into their own houses. It's a good premise, practical for groups, and firmly rooted in the fantasy adventure legacy of ttrpg's in general: it works. But, setting up stakes that aren't contingent on the threat of immediate, bodily harm isn't something that the classic setup inherently encourages. That's where cozy comes in. You've gotta give them a soft spot, if you want a soft spot to kick. I'm a mean old Goblin, but I stand by it. Thanks for another awesome video :)

I do think you can poke a hole in a ruleset off just a reading. At very least, you can ID if the focus of the game interests you at all. Even the world's best RPG that beautifully encapsulates a fencing simulation and the world of revolutionary France might still fall flat the minute someone asks if his musketeer can use a musket.

What I like about your reviews is that you present your own educated opinion, but you also give enough information for the viewer to make their own opinion regardless of your recommendations. That would explain the sales of products you didn't review favourably. They are also a great source of entertainment and inspiration on their own.

Don't take this personally But this was a great explanation of the game review process. I have a VERY limited game budget, and I really don't want to invest in a game that turns out only to have good cover art but turns out to be a retread of Tunnels and Trolls. So being able to find a good review is very helpful.

178? I've got some watching to do!

18:35 One of my favorite things about Seth's reviews is that it's often stuff I've never heard of (or heard of through his work). It's an entertaining way to learn about game systems that someone else has test driven and is prepared to talk about. I already know about and play 5e; I don't need to be sold on it.

Damn… that’s why we won’t ever see a WHFB review from Seth! He doesn’t like the genre!

i think the most important thing a reviewer can do is provide some sort of policy and/or transparency about how they reviewed a thing. "i haven't played this but here are my thoughts" is always more valuable than "i have ran this for five years with great success (but won't tell you all the ways i've modified it)"

Are we going to get a Gaslight review next?!

Sponsored content are bad

In regards to your "bad reviews" not seeming to bias people against buying the product... you give thorough reviews, and really don't review anything you'd really have to badmouth (I had to think for a good while to remember what your idea of a "bad review" was), and tell people how to deal with the rough parts. So they go, "yeah, it's not great, but Seth didn't hate it, and I know what I am getting into, and a couple ways to fix it, and the price they're asking for it seems reasonable for what I am getting, sooo..."

I really enjoy your review videos and like your policy. There are some flip through channels I enjoy, perhaps it would be best to say "Impressions" instead of reviews in such cases. However, I have seen something you mentioned and it really rocked my world last year. Basically I used to follow what is probably one of the largest non-D&D TTRPG review channels on KZbin (not as large as yours!) and enjoyed their videos. They then reviewed a TTRPG I was very familiar with. I was shocked that they completely misrepresented it's contents, even saying some things that were totally false about the game indicating they hadn't read it at all. At the end, after having this false information given they *recommended people not consider the RPG*. I was shocked! I contacted them and asked if they'd simply reconsider and edit their review to include the correct information and got a simple "thank you for your feedback." (They later corrected their most blaring mistake but missed a bunch of otheres) It had 50,000 views and over 200 comments. About 25% of the comments were "phew glad you told me this I dodged a bullet with that game! Now I won't play it!" Imagine falsely harming an indie TTRPG company in that way. In the case of another reviewer he was reviewing the *wrong copy* but when contacted he apologized, took down his video, reviewed the content again more carefully. Respect! The idea of casually harming a cottage industry TTRPG company by saying incorrect things about their game is just about rage inducing!

6:53 man, you kind of sell yourself short here don't you? I mean 33 years of experience running and playing is bingo but.... have you also wrote RPG adventures too? Revised them as well.... Like you are beyond an expert in this area. As far as I know, the only thing you don't have is your own RPG system from the ground up! Humble is great. Sometimes though it is good to hear a person's true credentials on a topic.

You're right! You can't do a review without playing the game! A board game reviewer would never get away with just reading the rules...

Seth! You broke your rule canon. You made a dark creepy joke in full color & the explanation was in B&W. I don’t know how to feel anymore.

When I saw the title, and the opening, I thought this was going to be a little too far afield into the abstract, and I usually like TTRPG philosophy vids. But, wow, this might be one of my favorite vids from you. You defining the reviewing space, getting into the ethical of product reviewing regarding personal integrity and audience trust, and explaining your approach ... all that gets under the hood showing how you consistently deliver content that demonstrates consideration to both reviewed product and audience and an approach that emphasizes that quality over the quicker crowd of hot off the press takes. It was like a back stage tours of the principles that make your channel work. Well done.

Absolutely awesome content. Liked and subscribed!

Hmmm... do the two Delta Green call outs mean we might see some Delta Green reviews in the future?

i'm gonna start a review review channel where i review reviewers based on their biased reviews. now i just need to find a way to get paid for it

I simply do not listen to internet personalities who have just read a game. If I want low-quality opinions like that, I can read the book and make them myself.

I love all of Seth skorkowski's videos

Wait, you believe that if you are going to review something you should have used that item? Don't you feel entitled? Everyone calm down that was a joke. Just like Seth does jokes in his videos. It is one the reasons I watch, he is funny. It is logical and makes sense if you don't use something how can you have an opinion on it? You can have someone else's opinion but not your own. Seems pretty straight forward to me. Thanks for what you do. I enjoy Seth Skorkowsky videos because they give me a lot to think about.

What are your thoughts on rules-lite games? Or do you prefer mechanic/rule 'crunchy' games?