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The stereotypical roleplay includes a regular high school with no redeeming qualities whatsoever other than all classes being fighting classes with different names. Alternatively, classes start in one neverending week.

Gravity is not electromagnetic, although it is true both do more or less the same and can be calculated with similar equations. Gravity is believed to be caused by distortions in spacetime, according to relativity, or by gravitons, according to more modern theories. Electromagnetism is more...

Actually, the Earth's magnetic field is caused by the activity of its core, thanks to a phenomenon explained by the Dynamo theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_magnetic_field#Physical_origin

That's a very good explanation, actually. You could save it and paste it whenever someone asks you about what does Mary Sue mean because it goes straight to the point. Actually, making a master tactician is not inherently Mary Sue (although you are almost there just by using this trait alone)...

It depends on how much you want your players to stay inside your framework. If you want to go the "cooperative writing" route, you can ignore most details and just let your players make stuff up about your setting, but I personally don't like this. I think you should define some really basic...

In a roleplaying setting, the bare minimum would be to explain what magic can and can not do, mainly to avoid players going too crazy with their character's powers. Defining what magic is, where does it come from, how it works... it is nice, but unless you want to make some deepest lore and go...

The problem with tactical geniuses is that they are never tactical geniuses. That trait is often shoehorned into character sheets just so they can say "it was all according to my keikaku, guise!" after they get out of a situation by sheer luck or the power of plot armor that all freeform...

I don't think you should drop a character you don't know how to play. Nowadays, skimming over basic layouts of how a certain procedure is performed is very easy thanks to the Internet, and if it isn't you can just do the trick by fading to black in the right moment or even simply fluff the...

The problem with high school roleplays is that high school sucks, and as such you will never see an actual high school game doing well for too long. I have to agree with Dusky: the only way of making a high school game fun is by paying very little attention to all the bits that make high school...

Fantasy is a stale genre. What's supposed to be a generic catch-all term for anything that's not set in our universe (either past or future) has become a synonym of "medieval Europe with wizards, dragons, elves and other fantasy races", and honestly, I blame Tolkien for it. For some reason...

The concept you have expressed is fairly vague, but from what I understood, you want to make a sci-fi setting with a focus on stealthy elite recon units, right? The best way you can handle this is by making the players take the role of spies. There is no much point in terrain recon in the...

I don't think being beautiful is a Mary Sue trait, nor is being smart (smart, not "look at these arbitrarily high numbers I made up that are supposed to be my IQ", in which case you have probably entered deep into Mary Sue territory), nor is having a tragic past. Very little traits are...

There is nothing inherently wrong with having a GMPC, although depending on several factors you could go into Bad GMing territory. Your GMPC can be a simple quest giver. He or she has money to hire the party or knowledge the PC deem relevant to their interests, and just accompanies the players...

The short answer is "because tragic stories are edgy, and edgy is cool". The long answer is, amateur writers will gravitate towards tragic backstories because of several reasons. For example, expanding on the short answer, tragic stories tend to be shocking. Amateur writers often feel the need...

The closest I got to a Mary Sue was my first roleplaying character in an MMO. She was a master alchemist (justified through game mechanics, though), vat-grown daughter of the most famous alchemist in the world, with a gorgeous body and a cute face, and also an evil split personality formed after...

I intentionally leave them vague unless I have a good reason not to (such as internal monologue jokes or things like that). While my usual type of narration is far from objective, I try to avoid deep inspection of thoughts as much as possible. This means, the narrator knows very well the...

At least you are playing with people who try to interact with other players. I have found several others who are always running from action, somehow seeming to avoid contact with anyone else, or at least actively blocking any form of reply you could give to them. These players often have the...

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter had genetically engineered dragons, now that I remember. They were made as giant mass destruction bioweapons, but ended up contaminating the atmosphere so much humanity had to build gigantic underground cities (I guess, as cheaper or easier alternative to the...

The problem with magitech settings is that you either simulate the entirety of cultural and societal evolution or you provide a good explanation as to why suddenly magic, like Shadowrun did. For example, if magic is a widespread thing that everyone can learn, why even bother inventing the...

Blind bid is probably the only type of diceless system (without taking card-based systems into account, but I consider those dice-like) that can still keep the suspense of a diced system. 100% deterministic systems will never provide enough depth due to their nature, both to combat and opposed...