Recent content by tetrasodium

Your pretty much pointing a spotlight on the level of unjustified overcompensating present in 5e's pendulum swing trying to counter a perceived potential problem of ttrogs v 6-∆7 editions of d&d back by ensuring that PCs are pretty much incapable of failure and players encouraged to believe...

Not every public game is made entirely of people who have never met each other, especially when the GM is running at a con localish to where they live and run their regular games. I've played at multiple tables with multiple systems at local cons with gms I knew and previously played with...

You can find general sales of physical books from bookscan(?) and see Amazon sales rankings showing things like 2014 phb higher ranked than the new one, same with ddb. Some of that may or may not have changed by now, but I feel like I've still seen it reported about fairly recently.

The folks harping about books covering that kinda tomb of horrors stuff as if that were the entirety of the game in the past are awfully silent about all of the core book pages devoted to topics we would class under terms like sandbox living world character development and so on too

I don't think it's done to ''bolster wotc's reputation ". A lot of the claims about that style happened at least sometimes>so that style was common to the point of being normal and thirsty just accepted seems to be done while pushing for wotc to continue designing so heavily against it that...

I think that was more the result of well meaning in experience during the pre Internet age. In those cases it usually started out trying it because they saw it read something that made it sound like that was how a RealGM should act. There are even a bunch of psychological things relevant to...

Not sure I'm reading this as intended, but think I agree. Back in the day It was totally different for someone in the party to fall prey to some horrible hazzard as the gm is literally pointing to the page where said Hazzard is described exactly as it played out vrs while the GM is winging it.

Posting from my phone and the link didn't go through on the "this" as intended. You might be more familiar with the obscure module it evolved into a couple years later in 83 after he was hired by tsr to bring those ideas into d&d itself. I'll toss on a couple Christmas commute friendly videos...

Is this 1980 Tracy Hickman module close enough? I'm not exactly digging for a word for word comparison but those 4 points in paragraph 4 look very much like the Hickman Manifesto that kicked everything off wrt that kind story development in d&d under the Hickman Revolution.

We might define "engage with" in wildly different ways. What is your definition where a player is considered to be "engaging with" when they completely ignore a Homebrew or official setting's lore themes and tropes while demanding the gm endlessly adjust the setting to fit conflicting additions...

Those are all great examples of "I really wanted this $MechanicalThing can I use it and say xyz so it fits?". It's so much cleaner and less likely to be disruptively conflict brewing as the campaign goes on". Unfortunately the 5e trend has become one where players have been provided such a...

It was toxic then it's toxic now. D&d is a game with a division of roles with differing authority over fiction & place in the shared narrative all bound up in the randomness of the dice. There is no telling of a story and none of the individuals involved in play have enough authority over all...

That does not change the problem. In fact you are proving the point about being a disruption by not even engaging with the reason for the hypothetical concept being rejected. I said it before, I'll quote myself Part of character creation is making a character that fits the setting. If a...