Edgar Ironpelt's latest activity

I can confirm that. I was there as one of the impure Simulationist GMs. And there were arguments about whether or not randomizers could...

As you say: "That's one philosophy, but not mine." Or rather there's another trade-off. Yes it's nice when player cleverness aligns with...

Hiding the tell in the "blahs" has its own drawbacks. Among other things it tests player-skill instead of character-skill. As a player...

Overall, I use traps very sparingly. They're a hassle for NPCs & monsters to set up, so they won't without believing they have a good...

What do you mean by "tells"? They might be signs that "everyone sees automatically, the GM shouldn't require a roll." They might be...

I prefer to ban them completely. If you need an auto success/fail rule to hit/miss, that's the rules and the dice telling you that the...

My "Brotherhood of Rangers" game is a "restricted gestalt" one: PCs must be ranger-gestalts with only one other class. It works very...

Re 'joke' characters, I've done a few tongue-in-cheek things as NPCs, so my touchstone for joke or joke-adjacent PCs is "Would this...

As a GM I dodge the issue through a combination of having racially cosmopolitan nations and strict enforcement of "approved PC races...

I prefer to have magic-augmented economies in my game-worlds. Magic-augmented food production in particular, but also other forms of...

I don't play 5e, but in earlier editions I preferred to start characters at 4th level (or even higher). So if I did ever abandon my...

And as I posted previously: "Implementing this causes complexity to creep into the initially simple system." It might be a net benefit...

LFQW very much did exist in 1e AD&D. I know because I was there. It was mitigated by making low-level wizards extra wimpy so that...

The weakness of slot-based encumbrance is dealing with small items - items where there is a desire and powerful intuition for allowing a...

The reason why there are so many solutions is that people don't find the existing solutions satisfactory - even when there are already...