Recent content by Pedantic

I don't agree. If anything, an updated OGL would serve this role better. This is definitely true, but is not at all exculpatory, and certainly not worth celebrating.

This is exactly what I don't like about this response. It doesn't "turn out" anything, and there was nothing weak about the status quo until WotC broke it. They destroyed a totally functional edifice that would have continued without their intervention. Just putting it back up doesn't resolve...

I don't have your tolerance for corporate action, especially in my hobbies. It's one thing to put up with casual inhuman behavior in my cell phone provider or a grocery store, it's quite another in my voluntary free time. That they moved from behaving slightly better (perhaps primarily as an...

There's a lot of ways they could have done it. An address saying "we were wrong to pursue this, we acknowledge the value open gaming has had to TTRPGs" followed by a breakdown of why they pursued it to begin with, and an acknowledgement that that's outside the scope of business norms is where...

Oh no, they could do way better, they just won't. There's obviously the classic SRDs in the CC, but I'd love a public retrospective on how/why they made the decision, maybe some internal reorganization. They could simply issue a new version of the OGL specifically preventing them from what they...

Yeah, it's wild to celebrate the CC as a better solution...when it was only a better solution because WotC endangered the initial commons to begin with. I don't really think they deserve a lot of credit for making it harder for them themselves to do that again, when they could simply not have...

The solution to that problem should be a design prompt, not a GM adjudication call. We don't need to build these generic system scaffolds to hang future at the table design on if we actually fully design skill systems to begin with.

It did no such thing, skill challenges are the antithesis of representing character growth. There's nothing aside from vague advice about how to describe things preventing a GM from representing the same obstacle at level 1 and level 15 and level 25. More importantly, there's no change in player...

Often I would historically, but lately I've leaned more toward mystery cults of very specific gods that I introduce when they become relevant.

Scaling DCs are design malpractice. They can serve no purpose other than rank illusionism; if you don't want the PC's chances of success to change, then don't lie to them with scaling abilities. The pretense of scaling challenges to those new DCs is equally ridiculous; that's just palette...

Northeastern United States, it's not uncommon.

A nice white cheddar is great on pie. A scoop of ice cream is nice with pie. Unfortunately, I've learned from personal experience that a scoop of homemade white cheddar ice cream is just upsetting, with or without pie.

I don't mind basketball? If any serious effort was made to balance the teams, there's some really interesting tactical play, and the short duration rounds make it much more watchable than many other sports. American football is too strategic and not especially interesting to parse round to...

Here me out, you're both wrong, and the rules should provide the player a meaningful set of decisions to make in pursuit of their goal for that conversation. :p If they can't do that, there's not enough difference between fiat and gambling to care.

Yeah, that makes sense. I struggle to understand how those two kinds of decision could coexist, and why it would not be arbitrary to pick one or the other, especially if both are expressed through the same mechanical framework all the time.