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They are in any event. But my claim here is that brand name D&D has structural reasons that make “act as a good compromise game/base to compromise from” a primary design goal that don’t apply to other TTRPGs. If I make a game that 10 people love and 10,000 people like okay and put it on itch, I...

If you’re playing with people matched together because of common play preferences, absolutely. The more physical proximity or out-of-game friendship are considerations, the more compromises everyone might have to make on system, GMing style, tone, and all the rest.

Something is Pareto optimal if you can’t make it better for anyone without making it worse for someone else. So I’d like faster and more lethal combat, but other people enjoy combat as a minigame or really don’t like their character dying. I don’t like the character build minigame, while...

And yeah. Layout! I'm not going to spend $150 on minor revisions of rules I already have but if {game my IRL friends will play} was layed out with the functionality of OSE or Monster Overhaul, I'd sell my kidneys. (Actually, wait, someone could do that with the 5.1 SRD already. Hmm...)

I think most of the rules and design decisions are Pareto optimal. Which doesn't mean that it's precisely to my taste, just that it would be difficult to make most parts better for me without making them worse for others, or for riding rough on the baseline of familiarity that the game also...

Running games of any kind will teach you to be a better GM, but the form of the large hardback adventure has a tendency to emphasize a very linear narrative. Official adventures since 2e have tended to have this format, which is quite different from the location-based adventures of OD&D, B/X...

I’m going to disagree here and say that the referee language is perfectly appropriate even in the simple case of a party that works together uniformly and a GM who enjoys seeing the characters succeed. In the traditional division, the GM has two roles that should really be distinguished...

They are, but of course OSR principles are (by definition) prescriptive as well, and all approaches benefit from GM skill. So at that level of abstraction there’s not much difference: challenge rating is a tool to make one style of GMing more manageable, while morale and reaction rolls and...

If I were in charge of the 2024 DMG - terrible idea, but - I think the correct decision would be to outline a few different styles and include concrete advice around those. As a starting point, just take the Principia Apocrypha, Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, and Dungeon World GM chapter and...

There has actually been some sniping in the OSR scene recently between blorb people and FKR people, with the former saying the latter concedes too much to the GM and the latter calling the former low-trust. I think this is unnecessary because blorb and FKR are actually completely compatible. OP...

Worth noting that there are a number of different dimensions of trust and authority. E.g, in OSR play the GM is expected to have absolute authority over the resolution mechanics, throwing out rules when they don’t apply to the situation, but it’s very much cheating for her to change her notes...

OSR-Style Roleplay involves common agreement over intent (with everyone agreeing that imagined events will unfold according to in-world logic) authority (with players controlling their characters’ actions, and the GM controlling the rest, and also making judgment calls about the unfolding of...

Anyway, D&D actually does have some pretty strong tonal consistencies: 1) There may be internal conflicts, but most conflicts are external 2) There is a group of protagonists with a found family dynamic 3) Protagonists grow in their skill and impressiveness 4) At least some problems can be...

Even if by “D&D” we just mean a particular piece of intellectual property licensed by Wizards, and if for some reason we care about that, it’s unclear this is a problem. Mattel’s big licensed product this year is doing great critically and at the box office because they gave the director such a...

To be clear, when I described recorded APs as “a different medium” from home games, I didn’t mean they were scripted. A recorded AP is also a different medium than a scripted radio play! (Or a CRPG, or solo journaling game, or whatever.)

It all depends on how precise you’re trying to be, and on what kind of game (another loaded phrase) the table wants to run. Even as someone who prefers more sim and less narrativist play, it’s a fine first pass description for someone who knows nothing. And regardless of whether it serves as a...

There was been a number of attempts, with I think something relatively recent finally being completed (someone can chime in hopefully), but 4th had the problem of a much less permissive license than 3rd and much more crunch than older editions.

Mostly just trying to lay out some vocabulary to clarify my own thinking around this. Use it for your own purposes, repurpose it, ignore it, whatever. Strategic decisions relate to deciding which goals characters will pursue, in a way that structures the rest of the campaign. For instance, “get...

Litigating exactly what another poster meant isn’t all that interesting, as opposed to figuring out what techniques are useful at the table when. I think what is clear is that a lot of players (not all!) have low tolerance for feelbad, and a lot of players (not all!) get frustrated with a lack...

There’s a lot of space between “everything in the world requires the party to solve it” and “the world is like the efficient markets hypothesis and if they don’t an identical party will.” For a lazy procedure for running a sort of living world type thing, you might have a d6 table for plot...