Recent content by Pedantic

Right, full on climbing rules for your ER doctor game probably won't come up until your Vigilante Medic and/or Doctor Hobbies 4:The Outdoors supplements. Where you spend that effort is obviously a function of what's likely to actually come up in play, which is further usually a function of genre.

Yeah, but that is its own cost. You're trading fidelity and depth of gameplay for ease of use. Which is fine, but not free, you now have less decision points and less places for players to interact and less unique emergent situations. That position is as strawmanable as the much derided set of...

I just don't fundamentally find this to be a very fun game. It skates by on all the other qualities that make RPGs good, the storytelling and exploration of a fictional world and all that, but it isn't essential to cause them. As soon as you start stripping that stuff back, the game is pretty...

I would not generally assign those powers to the GM, and I think RPG design is generally harmed by assigning those powers as a norm. That's stuff that should live in the same territory as board game houserules: obviously you can do it, and the game may be improved thereby, especially if it had...

This moves RPGs out of the bounds of "games" as a field for many players. Playing a game I don't know the rules to (unless we're talking about the sort of puzzle game where learning the rules is in fact the gameplay loop) is something I've described before as a special kind of hell. This takes...

It's not the RPG angle that's the issue, the term is politically charged and part of the stock standard set of conservative insults. You seem to be using it in honest ignorance of that context, which is a pleasant surprise.

We've never really recovered from the original sin of conflating ASIs and feats to begin with. It might have worked, if accuracy was somehow stripped out of the equation.

So how many clean, concise, broadly applicable universal resolution systems do we need? Because it would be really great to finally reach market saturation there, so I can go back to buying my monthly supplements full of new rules. It's weird to see complaints about the current state of affairs...

This is pretty unrelated to the Warlord stuff, but for clarity my issues with the skill system are much more fundamental; I'm looking for the skill system to encode specific actions and specific DCs to use them, instead of a generic difficulty table and a general expectation DMs will make up...

You know, I actually was following this discussion, and did narrow my eyes at the initial post. I do think the idea that 5e is an improved version of 3e is pretty pernicious. I'd put it on the same plane as holding 4e up as the inevitable outcome of trying to balance D&D. 5e is missing essential...

You're getting caught on a double negative. To add actual content: I called out a specific use of "immersion" earlier, which is completely unrelated to the character's (or player's) emotional state. Nothing much is accomplished by drifting the term back and forth.

Yeah, that's about what I expected. "Writer's room" is once again a way of restating the same objection, and it's getting read differently than intended because the actual objection is flatly denied as a viable play priority, as usual. This is the more specific definition that I think isn't...

I view the "establishment of situations" as an incorrect reading of the GM's role. They establish and populate a setting as a worldbuilder and separately animate the forces/people/things inside that setting. Situation is an emergent property of the interactions between those roles, the actions...

Is "writer's room" just another restatement of the "don't let me make decisions outside my character's actions" thing? That's a usual sticking point, because it's either vitally important, or eye-rollingly unrealistic depending on your perspective. I respect @kenada immensely for the design...

It's very common for 18xx games not to come with money (and/or to fully expect the terrible paper money they come with to be replaced with poker chips and a spreadsheet), and they are about as board game as it's possible to be.