Recent content by Composer99

(D&D 5e Spelljammer) DM rolled five critical hits.

It's my understanding you'll want to use monsters from MM3, Monster Vault, and Monster Vault: Threats to Nentir Vale, as those books have patched issues with monster math from MM1.

Just spitballing, but maybe they feel it's too much of a risk to try to break back into that market for whatever return on investment they can expect. Even a third party license arrangement might be too much of a risk; wouldn't want a product that flops to damage the brand. Especially since...

Thanks for your thoughts! In answer to I would say that, yes, much of the in-game activity does not directly relate to answering the crucial question that is settled in play, except insofar as it is putting the player characters in a position where they can answer it. Partly I think this is a...

It's my understanding that both OSR and storygames arose as a strong reaction to the predominant strains of play in the 1990s and early 2000s, so it doesn't surprise me that products from both styles of game sometimes come across as having something to prove and, however deliberately or...

I will defer to your experience and revise my post accordingly!

Okay, so then if I have this right: In a trad game, there is little lusory duality. If what is being authored is the goings-on in the in-game fiction, then a trad GM does a lot of authoring and very little experiencing (in the capacity of "being audience of other players' authoring"); the...

I think there are a few things at play here: First, I think most people haven't played many genuinely awful RPGs. Sure, maybe you hear about them, but played them? So sometimes the only point of reference you have for "bad" is "didn't like". By way of example, the TTRPGs I've played in the...

So, @clearstream, if I'm reading post 588 correctly, as an example of what you mean for what is ludically crux ("the important thing that is to be settled by gameplay" if that's a fair paraphrase?), in the Tyranny of Dragons adventure path, what has to be settled by gameplay is the answer to...

At this point I have to say you're also coming across as a tad self-contradictory. The following: seems to contradict: [Emphasis mine.] If "there are better mechanics ... or worse mechanics" for achieving a particular gameplay experience, how then is it "wholly out of bounds" to suggest that...

I don't think it's impossible for games to actually be badly designed, even if they have people who like them. The ET Atari game springs to mind. So does the recent Gollum game. (Personally, I would also count Monopoly as such a game as well.) That said, with few exceptions (such as the games...

This is a thread about games that aspire to be in the neotrad school of design - that is, games that aspire to deliver a gameplay experience that is recognisably neotrad. Is it not the case that games designed with some other design aims in mind - such as fully trad games (perhaps the most...

Apart from the final line, I am not so sure about this. D&D already has an extensible mechanic that the game already uses across varying scales of time and space to represent player character efforts to complete tasks where success is uncertain and stakes are meaningful: the ability check...

IMO taking a word that at this time has no antonymic denotations and using it to mean the precise opposite of its usual meanings is guaranteed to lead to absurd results. If "a lack of support" for a thing is the same as "supporting" a thing, then I guess Tetris "supports" roleplaying. Expanding...

I haven't played the game, so there's a lot of specifics that I can't conjecture about, but at least as regards gods like Silvanus being surprisingly passive, that strikes me as a game conceit - e.g. the druids are passive/cowardly because the player character party is supposed to solve the...