Recent content by soviet

Oh, interesting! Did not know that, thanks

Also, apropos to our hobby and general nerd-dom, the famous CS Lewis quote, 'When I became a man I put away childish things' and its meaning-reversing continuation 'including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.'

If you're a caster you probably shouldn't multiclass because getting to the next spell level is always going to be the most powerful thing you can do. If you're not a caster then you are free to take a much more mix and match approach. The level abilities that martial characters get tend to...

I applied 'say yes or roll the dice' to my real life and it got me sacked from my job in law enforcement.

It can really help to give the players effective but expendable resources - a bunch of decent healing potions, a scroll of fireball, etc. This is sort of a natural pressure valve that lets the players survive any encounters that go wrong or that prove to be deadlier than expected, without the GM...

I imagine what they resent is the constant insertion of those opinions. Imagine if I were to post 'I don't like 5e' multiple times in every 5e thread.

I agree that this is possible, and I think Rolemaster's implementation is basically this. However, no edition or variation of D&D has ever done it.

I'm sorry, but this is why the 'dead horse' of hit points keeps being brought up. Because the assertion that the rules of D&D serve only to model the world, and could not therefore have an agenda or a driving effect in play, is completely undermined by how hit points work. They are not even...

No, this is bad design. Why wouldn't you need combat to be balanced? That doesn't make any sense. How many of the fights in LotR were the sixth to eight one that happened that day? A lot of groups play D&D in this epic quest kind of way that doesn't involve a huge amount of fights per day...

Surely the other issue is that mandating 6 to 8 combat encounters a day is ludicrously bad design. For a dungeonbash type adventure that's one thing. But overland travel? Courtly intrigue? Information gathering in the underworld? A PC ambush on the big bad? All of these types of adventuring days...

OK, I see what you're saying. Thank you for elaborating. As I understand you you're talking about the difference between (broadly) filling a situation with drama fuel and watching (without particular preference as a player) to see how it explodes, versus a kind of skilled play approach where we...

'Play to find out which of two things happen', sounds great.

Well, note how immediately you have narrowed this from 'what happens' to 'how it resolves'. So a wide variety of possible outcomes and developments has become 'when the players get to the planned conflict, which side will win?'. OK I'm with you on the no fudging but doesn't the GM also have a...

I'm not sure what decisions you are talking about that are present in one game and not the other.