Recent content by Xetheral

Illusions can indeed be tricky. At my table I've expanded upon the ambiguous points and rough edges of the illusion rules as follows: "physical interaction" means personally touching the illusion (either with a body part or with an object one is wearing or holding) and automatically makes the...

I entirely agree. But that's orthogonal to my purpose in providing the example, which was to respond to @hawkeyefan's request for an example of where a DM exercising control isn't "about" the control. The DM exercising control to try to provide an experience desired by the players doesn't become...

I was responding to your request for an example of how DMs exercising control can be about something other than the control--in this case, providing an experience sought by the players. The example is just as valid regardless of your opinion on the experience sought and whether other approaches...

One example is that the DM exercising control can be "about" providing the experience their players seek. (Assuming, of course, a table with aligned playstyle preferences.) I can expand on that example from personal experience. As a player, the experience I seek is one where (among other...

Exercising control is not necessarily about control. At the most basic level, exercising control can be secondary to some other purpose, in which case exercising control is "about" whatever that purpose is. More broadly, as I pointed out previously, the concept of control is freighted with...

(Bold emphasis added in both quotations.) The answer to the bolded question above is that the connotation of "the desire for control" is unusually dependent on context. I see it as entirely reasonable and consistent for someone to espouse a preference for a DMing style that features maintaining...

Actually, it looks like I misunderstood what you meant by "trappings". Coming after your discussion of RPGs narratively tying character advancement to story, I thought you were saying that RPGs took from fiction the idea of fictional characters advancing/evolving in a fictional world, and then...

I entirely agree with that point. What I found interesting is that we seem to wildly diverge on what one can infer from that point regarding what elements of fiction D&D players care about. You said you inferred that a lot of players care only about the trappings of fiction, whereas I would...

You seeing a contrast between "metagame" and "metafiction" makes perfect sense, given your usage of "game". I just think that the other usage, where the fiction is the game, also makes perfect sense.

I excerpted this section from your longer post because I wanted to comment on your final inference in particular. I find it fascinating because my natural inference would be almost exactly the opposite: that some players care more about the core essence of the fiction rather than the particular...

I think it's because the word "game" is particularly fuzzy in English. Looking up the word in multiple dictionaries gives a huge range of definitions. When it comes to views of TTRPGs, I think some posters are viewing the "game" being played analagously to Collins definition 1: ...an activity...

That's why I suggested the enemy spellcaster get out of range or LoS of only some of the PCs. And why I suggested that mook spellcasters cast the enabling spells like blindness. If only one PC with counterspell is in range of (or has LoS to) the NPC spellcaster, then so long as the NPC...

That never was a problem for me--outdoors it was usually straightforward to get out of range of potential counterspellers, and indoors it was usually straightforward to break line of sight to the counterspellers by going around a corner. As long as you could get it down to only one PC...

Why doesn't it come up every time you hand out high-value gems as treasure to your players and they try to sell it? The high-value gems in the treasure tables are cut (none of the gems are described as "rough" and rough stones wouldn't be transparent as the descriptions in the book specify.) If...

Ok, I think we crossed wires at some point. @Maxperson is (assuming I'm understanding him correctly) treating the price listed in the book for cut gemstone treasure as excluding any value added from the cutting process. So my question for him was whether that means that cut gemstones found as...