Recent content by Paul Farquhar

The game is designed to emulate the prose. The prose is important to the game design. It’s far from irrelevant.

Is fun.

This. And 5e works fine if you don’t worry about balanced encounters.

If the fights are about expending resources, then the players cannot “lose” the individual fights. However, they can consume too many resources, as a consequence of bad rolls or whatever, which means the party will enter the final battle with no chance of winning. The solution is to focus on...

It had nothing whatsoever to do with resources (Beowulf didn’t use any). Beowulf did not fight the second monster because it didn’t appear until quite a while later. And that was because it was basically a sequel. one monster is enough for one story, having more monsters devalues all monsters.

2) is about genre emulation, 3) is about game pacing and fun. But they aren’t completely unconnected, true.

Nether of those are the correct reasons. 1) common sense aversion to a death spiral. No one goes into danger when they are exhausted - even if there is time pressure, going to your death ain’t going to help anyone. And this has always been the case since before 1st edition. You leave the...

I cast fireball to investigate how many hit points they have.

He is a very good Method actor.

It often is.

Or how deep your roots are. I moved around a fair bit and had several jobs, virtually living out of a suitcase for a period of my life.

It sounds like "future-proofing" to me. Not only compile a one shop lore resource, but to make it so that it can be amended as needed (to facilitate the innovation of others) and try and anticipate social or political issues that might arise.

You are vastly underestimating the variety of playstyles, and the difficulty for an outsider to understand and communicate them. exactly because you are an outsider for most of them, as am I and everyone else. I've written a thesis. Two, actually (one on Astrochemistry, the other on SEND and...

You realise that there is a lot of overlap between these categories? The people designing games are the same people who you find debating them on forums. I could ask for a show of hands, but I know some prefer to remain anonymous. They don't have any more special insight than you or I have. In...

Given that 10 is the target age, this is a positive, not a negative.