Recent content by Paul Farquhar

Famously, the game that everyone house rules, as the official rules are terrible*. *Since it was originally intended as an anti-capitalist parable, it was never meant to be fun.

I have seen at least one reference earlier in this thread.

Of course you can design it, no one is saying otherwise. What you can’t do is make people like it.

Nah, plenty of people enjoy playing D&D without thinking or caring about the rules at all. They just tend not to talk about it on the internet.

If the goblins are in a castle, with lots of arrows, cauldrons of boiling oil, etc, then they might pose a serious threat, but CR does not take tactical situations into account any more than it does player skill. Or the goblins in a field might run away and alert the goblin army. Or maybe the...

This is the key phrase. You cannot “average out” cars and bicycles and expect to get an outcome that is useful to either motorists or cyclists, never mind pedestrians.

Nope, I wasn't there, having given up on D&D years earlier. The current rules seem to be full of creative vaguery to me. Very much in the spirit of 1st edition.

Deadfire is good, apart from the central plot, which is terrible.

...explained Basil Exposition.

Is not the Stranger Things boxed set a Universes Beyond type product?

It's a problem that the game has to handle, because it's D&D's USP. By specialising, you have a far smaller market, and WotC is too big a company with too many overheads to be a niche company.

It's going to depend on the players, but I have had players interested in this in a Traveller campaign. Traveller is just much better at this kind of thing than D&D though.

That is ridiculously hyperbolic. If your players find an encounter too difficult there is no reason for it to "ruin a campaign" or even a session. They can retreat, or surrender, or be captured. Advice that "not all combat has to be to the death" is far more productive for the DMG. And is the...

I think people are largely unaware of how many encounters they have, and how many rounds of combat. And it clearly is going to vary depending on what kind of adventure (dungeon, wilderness, urban, political, horror, etc) is being played. Which in turn depends on what sort of adventures the group...

The biggest factor that determines the difficulty of an encounter is the skill of the players.