Recent content by Thomas Shey

At the very least it should be the default expectation. Otherwise, the whole group is constantly negotiating with each other just to do their damn jobs in the group.

Well, that's the thing; I actually have a fairly high tolerance there. A lot of things that will work people up I just don't really care about because they either don't matter or don't come up that often. But that doesn't mean my tolerance is unlimited, and I'm not going to pretend it is. So...

I don't care about their thoughts per se. But when they do that kind of stuff where its blatantly obvious there's no reason but the naked technical advantage that doesn't relate to anything in character, that's breaking the kind of social contract I expect, and if they want to try and game me...

Yup. I saw some of this same sort of thing in the playtest for Silver Age Sentinels back in the day, where the designer's tendency to ad-hoc things personally colored how much he cared about vagueness in the rules, too. But it can have even more subtle impact than that; the classic that's...

Honestly, for me sometimes its less about any actual benefit gained than just the player going right to the metagame knowledge (especially if I challenged them on it). And there's matters of degree; if someone is fighting a troll, cuts it, sees it regenerate, and then pulls a torch--that's not...

If that's real, that's one funeral home owner with a really dark sense of humor.

I guess that turns on how you become a spellcasting cleric, a wizard or a paladin. All those seem to have some knowledge baked into them that isn't necessarily locally limited.

Even in OD&D you aren't staying first level long, and again, if your idea of an "everyman" includes even a first level D&D wizard (where his hit points and personal combat capability are the least of the issue) then we have very different ideas of the term.

Sure, and that's legit. But if you're looking at a monster write-up that doing exactly what it looks like the (relatively traditional) take on a mythical creature should be, and want to use the mythical creature...

Oddly enough, I think that one is driven by people hitting adversarial players previously themselves, specifically players of rogue characters who consider it their God-given right to highgrade treasure just because they're the ones first on top of it.

I suspect he's assuming a combination mentioned in a published adventure (that may be specific for reasons of clues provided elsewhere--but that the PCs in-game may have well bypassed).

I don't know that "common folk" and "D&D wizard" have any meaningful overlap from where I sit, and as I said I'm not convinced its much better with cleric, ranger (especially the old-school ones) or paladin. Even if they started as common folk, by the time you get to being those, you aren't any...

Calling them trolls may be part of the point; its a term that both predates D&D and has associations, and that may be what you're looking for. It isn't about balance (at least not to me) its about jarring inappropriateness.

Not as long as you have things like D&D spellcasters in it it isn't. And I'm not sold even with things like paladins and rangers (especially the early versions where the latter were more heavy magic-oriented).

This assumes PCs are "common folk" which I don't think works very well for people in D&D classes, honestly. D&D is kind of a bad choice on all kinds of grounds for an everyman campaign.