Recent content by FrozenNorth

It’s a less serious problem than 4e. The problem with 4e was that solos got one or two attacks against the PCs 4 or more. A DH solo gets attacks about 50% of the time, more if the GM spends fear. The problem is solos have much fewer HP than PCs, so they don’t last.

Solos alone are good “speed bump” encounters where you are looking to burn some player resources before a more important fight. Also a good GM move on a failure that’s bad, but not too bad.

How? Tag team takes up one player’s turn, not both players’. Plus, tag team increases the chance of succeeding with Hope, which denies the GM a turn.

I 100% agree that “Sherlock Holmes that is an insufferable jerk to everyone” is both a frustratingly common and the worst presentation of him.

Fortunately, you don’t need to take my word for it. This is what the book says: p. 150 Success with Fear Work together to describe the success, then introduce a complication or cost as a GM move - but don’t negate their success with this consequence. Maybe an adversary attacks them in...

I think the idea of only burning two of HP/Stress/Armor works better in theory than in practice. Sure, you could choose not to burn Armor when you get hit and take the damage to HP, but most PCs don’t have enough HP to make this a viable strategy. Likewise, burning Armor to save HP doesn’t...

I don’t think you need to have attrition-based play, but from reviewing the rules, I suspect the ruleset would support it. Since on a short rest PCs can only recover two of HP, Armor or stress, and even easier combats with 1-2 Fear used are likely to wear the PCs down, after 6 combats the PCs...

When I read the Seraph class, my first instinct was that they had collapsed the cleric because the new framework eliminated the need for a class whose principal focus was on healing. It feels that healing in combat just isn’t as important in the system.

In the initial example (which came from a website) there was no mention that the break-in took place at night. That detail was added later.

So the issue isn’t that the « cook appeared out of nothing » which as we’ve established occurs whether the GM uses fail forward or a random encounter. The issue as you’ve identified is that if the PCs have approached breaking into the manor in a particular way « verifying the presence of...

Whether you like or not, 4e was as much a traditional D&D game as AD&D or BECMI. Fail-forward is not an optional rule in either DMGs I mentioned: it is DM advice. As for the rest, you are just stating your previous unsupported point, only with more emphasis. It’s not particularly more convincing.

I was only referring to versions of D&D for which I feel sufficiently confident I correctly remember a reference to failing forward. Failing forward may have been raised in earlier DMGs or other advice for earlier editions, I do not remember.

You speak for most traditional DMs now? As far as I recall, fail-forward was included in the 4e DMG, 2014 DMG and 2024 DMG, so it is a pretty standard tool and piece of advice in DM's arsenal. If you want to claim that many, if not most, DMs don't want to use the technique, you're going to...

In a fail-forward scenario, the consequence for failing forward is necessarily one the GM would consider plausible, so it is natural that the GM would be prepared to explain why the consequence is plausible. What you wouldn't see in a fail-forward scenario is a situation like the one here...

Why does this make a difference? You keep on returning that in one case, the cook is just "created" but in the other case they aren't, but the reasons you give don't support the claim that the cook is "just created" in the fail forward scenario, but isn't if the GM is improvising the scene...