We have a few more thoughts to bring you about Bloop Lanet, then we dive into some particularly great questions from listeners. Now let’s all sit back and listen, shall we?
System Mastery
Jef and Jon review roleplaying games, Star Wars novels and anything else that crosses their paths.
System Mastery 
You probably noticed this already, but you’ve got the ads from hell running right now. They won’t shut up, and make the page lag like crazy.
We’re always logged in as admins, so they’re never turned on for us. They’ll be gone in October, thankfully.
My rule on failing skill checks was always “the number on your sheet is how good your character is, the number on the dice is how good circumstances were.” This works for successes as well, so I can describe unskilled-but-lucky shots as well as skilled-but-overwhelmed, etc.
John Rogers also gives the great example of “failing by succeeding too well.” (eg: you impersonate the prince so well you need to spend all day at court or risk breaking character)
That’s a good way to play it. I might have to borrow that.
The hotdog floats?! I thought he had Mr. Peanut like legs!
It’s both. He’s like Doctor Manhattan.
The weirdest thing about Siembieda’s style, to me, is the way he keeps inserting personal anecdotes into every explanation of how the rules work.
Oh Christ are those ads annoying as hell. There’s no way to silence them, so I had to dig out the link from the html and listen to it separately.
Getting to the nitty gritty, I will say I sort of agree with you on rant on the narrative use of skill checks, however, multiple skill checks can also serve a narrative purpose. It would be highly possible to build tension with multiple skills checks, with the natural curve increasing the chances of getting a failure the more they occur. I do agree that characters should at least have an out, like if Doofus the Rogue decided to go sneak into a non-plot-essential castle and failed a stealth check, there should be at least something they can do to get their fat out of the fire, like perhaps get into a scuffle to silence a guard or make a bluff check to fast talk the guard and get out of the situation non-violently. I do like the idea of skill check failure just taking longer time.
The hilarious think about the murderhobo segue was that in the Bundy occupation trial thread, we got into a discussion about Sovereign Citizens and how they relate to the -mancer adepts in Unknown Armies. Even going so far to come up with a rough idea of the sovcitmancer whose gobblegook legalese with gold fringe flags and maritime law actually works, but they lose their powers if they go on welfare or take farm subsidies.
The hard sci-fi non sequitur was interesting because I’ve been developing in my off-time a retro-scifi setting set in the far-off year of 2020, but it’s an alternate universe where space exploration exploded in the ’80s and ’90s due to the Cold War, so most of the offworld colonies and outposts are 30-40 years behind Earth, so you could have CRT monitors, dot-matrix printers and largely unskilled space truckers and asteroid miners on interplanetary spaceships. Needless to say, I listened to the Blue Planet episode with apt attention. The biggest thing theme I think about the used universe genre like “Alien” and “Aliens” is sapping that splendor and wonder from space travel to where it’s basically just another job (which why when the Aliens appear, it bring back how much space is an actual threat), so I’m stuck wondering if I should keeping away from sentient alien races, with the primary opposition to the players being space corporations, criminal conspiracies, pirates, and Space Soviet Union.
Hey, what about DS9’s James Bond parody episode?
Please tell me that you’re going to spin off the Poppen Locken Cocken Blocken Rammstein song in the Our Dumb Songs. I really need to share that.