Recent content by Pedantic

I've described the primary fantasy at the core of D&D before as "violence can be sanctified and solve problems." It is not only okay to take a sword up against an enemy, but by doing so you will actively make the world a better place and achieve your goals. I would put minions in the same...

I don't is the thing! I either find a base map and maybe add assets if I'm doing a digital map for an encounter, or I hand draw a rough map. I do the later more often if I'm planning a large connected area out like a dungeon, given how much more work goes into doing that digitally, even with...

Right, we're leaving out steps. The proposed structure is creative agenda->design goal->mechanic. Pointing out a mechanic doesn't serve an agenda is pointless (in no small part because RPGs still struggle with successful implementation all the time); what was the design goal the mechanic tried...

I've been consistently frustrated with how difficult it is to go from a low detail to a highly detailed map cleanly. Ideally, I'd like a comfortable way to expand from my low-res, drawing with markers on a grid or hex paper (or digital equivalent) to a more detailed map with light structures and...

I'm becoming more empathetic to the stance we should avoid labeling mechanics with agendas. They end up serving as synecdoches for the design goals they try to implement, which might be aimed at an agenda. I'm not sure they can have any real valence in isolation. The whole understanding of...

I'm not suggesting those things are equivalent. Personally, I'm perfectly happy with the "fighters can just wade through lava" position, because a consistently applied, knowable mechanic that lets me draw conclusions about the world is significantly more important than modeling real world...

Is this not the whole sim point? The mechanics are a concrete representation of something that can be understood, and there is no "correct kind of experience." Or at least, the fixed nature of the mechanics is a design constraint; putting down stats for a housecat absolutely does define the...

To some degree, isn't this a good problem to have? Seeing aside scry and fry, I think it's probably for the best that the world have a bias toward small, flexible and highly powered teams over large military hierarchies to enable the whole adventuring premise in the first place.

You have to assume the point of the mechanic is not to try and succeed at the challenge. The goal is to see what happens as a result of the character wanting/trying something, not to act as an agent of the character trying to get the thing (a thing very muddied in skill challenges, because they...

You've got it backwards. It's not that there's some central campaign following the licensing trail between industries, it's that a lot of individual people don't want anything to do with Rowling and react when she appears in their hobbies or media.

Players are bad at math. Team monster will roll many, many more attacks than team hero and have many many more bodies to distribute their health between. That, and frankly I think your delight in random negative outcomes is anomalous. Negative events are interesting when they make you play...

Skill challenges are better understood as a shared fiction generation exercise that allows for player contributions to be digested toward a given output, instead of a gameplay mechanism. The limited tactical space is the point; by not privileging any particular action declaration over any other...

I mostly see this particular fudging example as more evidence that critical hits are a bad general mechanic that is specifically targeted at making high variability things happen to players. They should be a fairly limited class feature, tied to whatever trait is providing PCs with protagonistic...

"Meta" is a complicated prefix for RPGs. Because it's used in both the "meta game" sense you explained above, but also metatextual or metafictional, to indicate an awareness of the game fiction as fiction. When I discuss the local meta game of Netrunner, I do not mean the same thing most people...

I generally agree, though I would say that magic makes overwhelming the DC without taking 10 much more likely (though climb may be a bad example there, as it's routinely overwhelmed by spider climb). I'd point out a separate feature of the mechanic (not necessarily relevant to sim), in that...