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I've been thinking about hit points in the broader cultural context, while listening this podcast doing a playthrough of the Grailquest series of choose your own adventure books. This particular one quite pointedly describes the PC getting stabbed, through the stomach by a surprise spear trap...

I generally find "crunch" such a subjective metric. Are we talking about how many action by action choices players can make? How many steps resolution has, or how much variability there is between different kinds of resolution? I don't generally think character creation should be lumped in...

Oh I don't disagree at all, and frankly a flat 1 in X chance of finding secret doors isn't a particularly compelling mechanic, especially if you don't specify the timescale it takes, and especially if that timescale/chance of success isn't variable based on other outside choices. But that's...

My worst opinion, which I still believe no matter how much the world rallies against me is that root beer floats are just unblended rootbeer shakes, and would be better if everyone would just complete the process.

I largely agree with this, with two notable caveats: 1. I'm not sure death ought to be privileged as a failure state, if you're allowed to immediately select a new playing piece. Most players bring in a new character after death, and modern gaming norms usually mean a character at the same...

I don't have strong feelings about 4e's shift of HP as an encounter resource vs. a daily one, but I don't think the game went nearly far enough in explaining that was what it was doing. In practice something similar had already happened with CLW wands in 3.5.

The primary thing skill challenges did was remove the design incentive to write an action complete skill system. Instead of expecting the rules to lay out a procedure for all the actions a party might take when trying to get in to a castle, they offered a framework all action declarations could...

Yes, but then you get the confusion experience of clicking on the notifications, and getting directed to a "this thread cannot be found" page.

I think "Healing Surge" suffered a lot for the name. It reads as "all characters have X healing potions built in" not "all characters have Y capacity to be healed daily." Calling it something like Healing Reserve or Healing Tolerance and separating out the surge value into some other term would...

Unless I'm missing a setting, it definitely does. I have lost access to threads I was trying to respond to after ignoring the thread starter.

The problem for me is that some frustrating repetitive posters, or more obvious trolls routinely start threads that occasionally do result in content I want to read, even if I'm rushing past their posts.

I don't know if this was ever a thing, really. I play with board gamers and Netrunner players, people who regularly learn new rules systems for games from scratch, and somehow I still go every session with a player giving me the number they rolled and not their check total, or asking me if a...

Actually put together the big Fantasy Craft houserules binder I've wanted to get together for years, and then prep a short 2-3 session campaign to show it all off.

I am not a fan of skill challenges, specifically because they do pernicious things to the underlying design and gameplay incentives, which I've written about extensively elsewhere and don't need to belabor further here. I find myself routinely taken aback by the things they get praised for...

I see the point, but I'm not sure we should emphasize the medium as the divide. Open forum roleplay, MUDs and so on are quite specifically computer driven experiences, but are also very much imagination driven.

Difficulty isn't strictly correlated with risk of death. If it were, you'd actually expect risk of death to go down in proportion to your player's skill levels, and that 50% number would need to be measured across a population of players to be meaningful, saying something about how hard the...

I think maybe it's something to do with running across B/X written or said out in full as "Basic/Expert" enough times? That, and BECMI feels more separable than other, similar acronyms. You can imagine someone only talking about Expert or Immortal, so keeping them apart makes it clear that each...

Moby Dick infuriates me. My misguided parents decided I was wasting all my precocious reading talent on trashy fantasy novels when I was 12, and forced me to start reading classics. I was not interested, nor ready for Melville, and hated it while forcing myself through in that persistent way...

I prefer a sheet that spells out abilities at the level of action economy they take, and I tend to rewrite abilities in a simplified form to cover that. Including default or universally available actions (like Grapple or Shove) is helpful both in getting players to think of their abilities that...

Also, negotiation is an established game mechanic or sometimes genre in competitive games, and has connotations carried from there. Competitive negotiation games rely on players trading resources in exchanges both players must agree to, with the intent of structuring those agreements for...