Recent content by Pedantic

What do you call those discrete packages of mechanics that players use if not rules? I don't think there's a reasonable carve out here.

While it can and should vary based on the game and genre, I generally like PCs that are more powerful/impactful than the "baseline" person, but not in a unique way. Ideally, "adventurer" is an established class of powerful people that have a known impact on the world.

That feels like a stronger argument for a more detailed character creation system with more variability, not less.

This is all a question of degree right? It's not wild to have a specialized Oracle of the Moon Pool, it's pretty crazy to have a unique ability on a local sergeant of the watch.

Movie rules unconsciousness might be the single most common genre trope ascended to setting norm. Bonking someone on the head to put them out temporarily, without any complication more severe than a headache later is both utterly unrealistic and utterly normative.

It's just regression to an older, better design. The issue was moving the benefits from general rules about being unobserved or the invisible keyword to the spell itself.

If you start pulling on the consistency thread, you'll find proponents willing to do away with just about any PC exceptionalism.

This seems like a pretty standard 4eism to me, and a general extension of the idea that monster and NPC stats exist entirely to govern their interaction with PCs during combat. The game simply doesn't believe it's any concern of the rules precisely how you define the "no longer relevant to...

All the conflict here is because everyone seems to think the answer to that question is obvious. I personally think that's a huge design expense you need to be buying a lot with, the whole minion discussion is predicated on it being pretty cheap.

Yeah, I'm not saying the player's should determine which strategy is best, I'm saying there needs to be multiple strategies a player can discriminate between. And that can be undermined in a few different ways: if the approach does not influence resolution, if there's no advantage to any...

I'm not sure this can matter at the level of an individual action declaration, it's probably easier to zoom out to "get into the locked vault" as an objective. There should be a meaningful difference between "I bribe the guard," "I impersonate the bank manager," "I smash any door in my way" and...

Oh, that was just 3.5 RAW. Here's the spell: And here's the general rules on illumination: Shadowy illumination is less dark than darkness.

No, I'm saying the player's decision making being the most significant factor in whether or not they achieve their goals is definitional to agency.

It doesn't necessarily, but it's really easy to overwhelm participant's input with randomness, either by outright setting odds too low, or calling for iterated rolls. If the rolling has as much or more influence on the outcome than the player's decision, their agency is clearly compromised.

I'm firmly in the "for effect" camp, but I want to point out that "rolling" is doing a lot of conceptual work here. My preferred state of affairs is much more that players declare a set of actions as a strategy to achieve their intent; the endpoint shouldn't be to get to one or more rolls, but...