Recent content by Celebrim

I'm sure there are, but the economics of D&D content have changed tremendously from about 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, there was largely a potlatch economy where everyone was sharing their ideas, house rules, adventures and content quite freely. Now that it's so easy to publish, no one is...

I think that we are getting side-tracked in abstraction. Let's be concrete. It's my contention that fights with a pack of rats, a pack of wolves, a snake, a crocodile, a boar, and a brown bear should all be distinguished by more than simply how many hit points they have or how big their...

Sure 1e AD&D has over 1000 pages in its rule books alone. Just the core rules have as I pointed out have about 500 pages, but as I pointed (and in this case most people seem to agree with me) 1e AD&D isn't a complete game system and it's always supplemented by a lot of house rules. WEG D6 goes...

So animals frequently fall into that category of low challenge opponents that you really aren't meant to fight beyond the "rats in the basement" stage of learning the game, but there is plenty of opportunity to distinguish animals from each other by size, speed, mode of attack, mode of movement...

I mean, it's not an unreasonable approach. As I said, I don't think this is a problem with one right answer because everything is a tradeoff. What I do think is important is having more than one tool in your tool bag to fit the approach to the importance of the problem. One of the tradeoffs...

I watched a lot of Emergency! as a kid and I distinctly remember that at least two of the PCs spent time climbing up and down ladders as well as interacting with the characters in the ER.

How much bad design bothers anyone in a particular area is subjective, but it doesn't make it less bad design. It's just problems you can live with. I really don't like generic monsters at all. You can sort of get away with it with very low challenge rating introductory monsters, and you see...

It's really weird interacting with you because right from the start you held this seemingly solid conviction that I didn't know what I was talking about and whatever opinion I had must be held in ignorance and that I might like what I know rather than knowing what I like. But at the same time...

Ok, we're on the same page then.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, and it's a really solid start to designing a system. Like, particularly if your planning your game to get so successful that you're going to end up being a brand manager and delegate writing out to contractors or employees, having that sort of core...

IIRC, I called those two specific skills out as well so it sounds like you and I both have a lot of real world GMing experience. I could get into other ones potentially like lifting, jumping and carrying, but there the reason a single core mechanic tends to fail is different than the first...

Sure. They function well as limited toys that do one thing and are great for one offs and short campaigns. Eventually they are constraining and people drop them. Or maybe they just have very limited aesthetics of play and exercising their thespianism in a narrative game with a lot of low...

It's sort of like claiming you have to memorize three monster manuals before you can play D&D, or that it's a greater mental burden to look up the stats of a Bulette in a book than it is to run one by fiat with no recourse to rules.

Do you know what a b-tree search is? Because it's pretty obvious to me how you would keep subsystems from taking up mental space until they were needed. The idea that there exists a supplement that lists a bunch of monsters, or a supplement that is a mass combat extension of the rules, or a...

I feel that sums up your whole position nicely.