u/tlenze

À l'Intérieur is probably not for him. I found it to be very good but very intense.

Eden Lake might be good. I like the general tension finished off with the gut-punch ending.

Mutant: Year Zero has a home base called The Ark. It starts with low stats of food, water, security, culture, and technology. There are projects to increase those stats you can build which do require skill checks, but the resource gathering portion of the game involves going out into The Zone (the area not-The-Ark) and finding things. Each sector you roll for random encounters which could be anything from a raiding party from another ark to mutant dogs to a robot control tower. How they deal with those encounters is completely up to the PCs. They can fight them, talk with them, sneak past them, whatever.

There are also random threats to The Ark itself. It could be raiders from outside (hope you had increased your Security) or a one of the Bosses trying to perform a coup and take over control of The Ark.

All of this creates a lot of drama, and you have a constantly ticking down population as members of The Ark die over the course of time.

Yep. Not at all once, but they're drip feeding them. It's the Lucha Underground channel.

My favorite vampire movies:

Let the Right One In

Sinners

My favorite werewolf movie:

Ginger Snaps

Sadly none of those are sapphic. If you want something with a vampire and a hunter in a sapphic Romeo & Juliet relationship, check out the TV series First Kill on Netflix.

If you want to try something a little different, chapulines (grasshopper) are pretty tasty. I had them in a taco at Oyamel in DC. You can probably find them other places as well.

He tried to make an homage to Cannibal Holocaust but completely missed what made that a movie I enjoyed watching. So, I hated Green Inferno.

Balance: What to aim for and how to adjust things on the fly

I've found other DMs worry a LOT more about balanced encounters than I do. I generally start throwing location-appropriate monsters on the table until it looks right. If I am overwhelming the PCs when I don't intend to, I have tricks (like having the NPCs argue over loot division, which they're obviously going to get because look how well they're doing) to delay or take them off the board.

If the encounter is not as challenging as I wanted, I have ways to either bring more monsters into the encounter (goblin chief blows his war horn) or to beef up the current monsters (orc shaman places a rage blessing from Gruumsh on the orcs.)

Also, I sometimes just have the PCs be beaten and captured, because fresh meat tastes better than old meat, and have them figure out how to escape. They don't need to win every battle.

I'd rather watch Dragon Lee or Chad Gable than Roman, Cody, or Punk at this point. Just because you don't want to see Lee or Gable doesn't mean everyone else doesn't want to.

'68 adds some extra benefit to Turf, at least for the Hawkers equivalent crew. (I can't remember their name off the top of my head.) Basically, when you sell your drugs, you get X amount of stacks per Turf, where X is determined by other claims you own. So controlling Turf not only reduces the cost to increase your Tier, but it also makes you more money.

Yeah, Unknown Armies adds a dice trick or two as well as having a very different setting from any other d100 game I know of.

I've not been, but the Hawaiian lady who lives in my neighborhood brought some food from the Hawaiian BBQ in Annandale on John Marr Drive to a potluck once. I really enjoyed it, and I assume since she likes it, it's pretty legit.

Flashbacks into long-term project rolls. I let them bank a downtime action going into a score for that specific purpose (which they use or lose) and/or charge them a Coin for each roll they make.

You can always resist. It's just how much Stress is it going to cost you?

Ah, okay. Thank you for clarifying what I was missing.

Commonwealth Cooling & Heating has never done this with us. In fact, one tech tried to talk us into a cheaper solution.

Oh no... I get to see Iyo, Stephanie, Chad Gable, and Dragon Lee wrestle... I hate to see fun wrestlers...

Point being: I just played the odds. Sure, there is a theoretical risk of rolling a 1 in 1250 pool and taking 5 stress, but that's very rare so not actually much of a guillotine hanging over my head. Plus, that 5 stress is not "5 stress or no stress", it is "5 stress or the consequence you are resisting" and THAT trade would generally be worthwhile.

Which is kind of my point as well. You started worsening your position because you knew you could resist the consequences. That, in turn, creates more dramatic outcomes, either good or bad. And I love drama in my Blades games.

I say watch the whole thing. The Leviathan season is the roughest, which surprises me given I loved The Magicians, and the person running that season was the showrunner for The Magicians.

When I was a player, I intuited that resistance dice would be extremely valuable and it did turn out that speed-running to four resistance dice trivialized most resistance rolls. I suppose this is sort of a reward for system mastery, but it might be too effective.

I like to think of that as a situation where people are more likely to trade position for effect because they can resist every roll. However, that just leads to more chances for them to roll poorly and suddenly pick up way more Stress than they expected to. It leans even harder into that "drive your character like a stolen car" best practice, which I consider great, because they WILL roll four 1s at some point...

I look at it as you haven't built a rep as a crew that tier yet. Sure, you might have been a well-known/-respected Tier 1 crew, but now you're playing with the Tier 2 folks, and can you hang with them?

The most I have in a week is 4. More often, it's 2. However, none of those are the same game. I'm running 6 different games, and I only do one session per week per game at most. Most of them are every other week.

This sounds like a Roguelike to me. You make multiple incursions into the same dungeon, learning it, mapping it, and figuring it out. However, Roguelikes tend to feature characters dying a lot. I'm not sure if that's a dealbreaker for you or not.

I haven't played any Roguelike RPGs, so I can't suggest any, but it might be a genre to look at.

I did! I'd already seen Intruders but forgotten almost everything about it. So seeing it for almost the first time again there. The rest were new to me, which is always the best thing about Dismember.

Honestly, I liked D&D 4e for this. You had weaker powers/abilities you could use all the time (at-will powers,) ones which were moderately powerful and could be used once per encounter (encounter powers,) and your most powerful abilities could only be used once between long rests (daily powers.) You were capped at the number of powers you could "know" at a time, which encouraged you to consider swapping one at level up (or daily if you were a wizard,) and it also kept you from having too much analysis paralysis during an encounter. Oh, and the daily powers often had a weaker failure state if you didn't make your to-hit roll, which made using them feel less risky.

I saw it was already posted in the mega-thread, but if you want me to list the movies from Saturday, I can.