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Neither, luck can always affect things. If they had average luck and easily beat an encounter I thought was hard, then I messed up. The DM has to take into account the party's tactical proficiency in encounter balance.

I guess I'll have to take your word for it, as I have no intention of checking this.:lol:

I absolutely disagree with this. Here's an example that I think illustrates why. PC Bob has combat abilities that are optimized for fighting orcs. PC Joe has combat abilities that are optimized for fighting zombies. If the DM chooses mostly orc encounters then Bob will be much stronger than...

Balance in an RPG can have several very different meaning depending on the context, which is unfortunate because it can cause confusion in discussing the topic. It can mean equivalent power between PCs, it can mean equivalent utility of character ability options, and it can mean appropriate...

I'd like to request this issue be prioritized. I use the "notifications" to check if there's anything I should reply to, and this issue makes this harder. It's not that big of a deal, but it is materially affecting my enjoyment of the site.

For me it's the community, plain and simple. You can get interesting discussions where people disagree and still act like grown ups with respect to manners, constructive criticism, and synergizing opposing ideas. That's just about unheard of on the internet. It's definitely not the D&D focus...

I think this gets right to the heart of the issue. Being knocked out of play is no fun, but god-mode play where you can't lose is no fun either. My solution to this issue is to have each player run two characters. This greatly removes the chance of being entirely removed from play when save...

Distance is diagonal with the Pythagorean formula of course, but range is dependent on gravity, too. Shooting up greatly reduces or your range because energy normally used to make the arrow go further has to be used to get the arrow higher. Aiming is a pain too, unless you practice for...

I've used a house rule very similar to that since AD&D and it's worked well: If you're in melee and want to move, you either take a regular move or a fighting withdrawal. If you take a regular move the other guy gets an extra attack with rear attack / whatever bonuses. If you do a fighting...

This is a very cool idea. I would enjoy an ancient China based game. There's a challenge, though. Because we're at a tabletop, we fill in our RPG experience with our imagination and things we've learned about comparable settings. Since American and European players are much more familiar...

Yes, xp, like every other piece of the game, is an illusion. But getting xp is fun. And as a DM I've always found the effort required to compute it trivial.

On a second read, Saelorn's post made a bit more sense to me, but I still disagree. In an RPG there is a game-fiction, a consensus, shared idea of how the world works, and IMO it is more important than the rules. The rules do not determine the game fiction because no set of rules that is...

Someone call John Clark!

That's more than a little one-true-wayist. D&D is a game, and a group is free to change the rules any way they want to. I'm a huge proponent of realism in RPGs, but the point doesn't really apply here. There are no such thing as XP in real life. A realistic RPG would award skill advancement...

Me too. Fix, please!

Before commenting on the articles, I want to comment on the comments. A lot of them could be summarized as "please stop publishing articles that I don't agree with." Seriously? How do you ever expect to learn something new if you only talk to people that think the same things as you do...

The system in the OP has potential. I'd like to see the full version. I really hate cyclical initiative. Sure it's faster, but it's BORING. My favorite system was 2E. Combat was a lot more interesting and fun that way. Re comments on deciding what you do before rolling initiative - I think...

I think it's a pretty interesting idea. Yes it fold two disparate ideas together, but so do all of the other stats: dexterity (agility & fine motor coordination), Intelligence (even in RL this describes a whole raft of things), Wisdom (decision making, will power, and faith), Charisma...

Hopefully if it's made, they'll base it on the first couple of books and ignore the rest. Xanth went like most Piers Anthony series, and there were a lot, the first couple of books were really good, and the rest were crap. I've always thought that he must have had the later books in each...

Just say no. The DM should know better.