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And that, precisely, is why GMs neither have nor should have "absolute power". No one who is not willing to make personal sacrifices for the good of the group merits leadership. Full stop.

And my experience is precisely the opposite. Either the campaign is using something not created by anyone in the group in the first place, so we're all operating under limits players will already know because they can just read the material; or the campaign is bespoke for this specific thing...

... Socially punished. And if you think ENWorld as a community doesn't use social pressure to control or manipulate the behavior of others, then I'm not sure what to tell you, because it happens all the time. And I'm not talking about the moderators enforcing the rules. That's completely...

Then ENWorld, GitP, Myth-Weavers, Reddit, Discord, Roll20, and at least two versions of the official WotC forums are unsafe. Because I have seen this exact thing happen in every single one of those spaces. Yes, even here.

@CreamCloud0 already covered this, but I thought I'd throw my hat in the ring too. Your premise is flawed, by way of a fallacy of equivocation. We can talk about the balance of a method, which will need to take into account the spread of possible results. A single character cannot, even in...

I was given to understand that there wasn't actually a formula at all, at least not in 2014. They used the formula, and then did playtesting and found the formula led to undesirable results. So they just...eyeballed it, more or less. Vibes-based design, tweaking CRs up or down until they seemed...

Congratulations to them; as @darjr said, I much prefer Christmas hiring to Christmas firing. That said...am I the only one thinking these are a lot of high-profile hirings? That is, WotC hasn't exactly filled the calendar with a bazillion new releases. We've had a whole thread just to say...

Are you familiar with the story of Isis? She actively put the safety of the universe at risk in order to get Ra's ren, what we would call his "true name". When she received it, she became the most powerful deity in the pantheon, mastering magic, cosmological power, political power, and healing...

The one, and only, thing preventing any first-party D&D option from appearing in Eberron is because the GM personally decided they didn't like it. Everything--everything--has a place in Eberron, unless the GM refuses. Which means the GM takes 100% of the responsibility for choosing to excise...

Why is there this persistent idea that rejecting a game is the easiest thing anyone ever does, and never has any negative consequences or reasons why people would be unwilling to do it? Rejecting a game is not a trivial task. Rejecting any social engagement, especially if it's one where People...

Are you really going to dismiss the depth, maturity, and (yes!) realism* of Eberron with "Another boring anything goes book"? *Major example, religion. Eberron religion is FAR more realistic than nearly every other official setting.

I'm sorry, but calling that a "campaign premise" is...I have no words. That's not a campaign premise. It's not even a setting premise. It's literally just "I declare X!" A "campaign premise", like a "story premise", is the central conceit or set of conceits around which the experience...

My preferred solution is to not use hidden checks, and to not have mechanical situations where the player knows the truth but the character cannot. So a weak Perception check (say, rolling a 9 vs DC 10 to 15) would produce ignorance, or two+ conflicting pieces of information that the party has...

It is not a matter of whether someone can have preferences or not. It is a matter of whether someone is inventing BS excuses in order to reify their preferences. Whether someone is pretending that the actual problem is some external, objective thing--like "I cannot do that, it would violate...

It is what I have been told by an actual user on this forum. I don't want to name names, particularly when the poster in question clearly has chosen not to participate here. But I assure you it is a specific person. I can DM you the name if you care enough to know it, but I would request that...

Unfortunately, spot on. I wish it weren't true. I really do. It pleases my physics- and math-loving heart to no end to have perfect symmetries and clean, exception-free formulae. But the purpose and function of any random monster, as a part of the gameplay experience, is fundamentally different...

I assume that if someone vociferously defends a position, it's because they practice it. Generally speaking, folks mention when they play devil's advocate.

I mean, it's partly based on what someone on this very forum has said, which got a bunch of upvotes from other users. Hard for me to take that as a weird extreme when it's an actual viewpoint argued here and supported by other users.

"I don't do this bad thing, therefore this bad thing never happens" has never been a valid argument.

As just freshly argued, I disagree. Except it doesn't. Like literally it doesn't. I don't exert that kind of power in the game I run. The game does not fall apart.