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I have little patience with 1st level characters who think they're the Kings of the World. You want to deal with the kinds of problems that Elminster is dealing with? Work for it. You want to be as important as Han Solo? Earn it. Players who whine because there are demi-gods in the world when...

Hussar has his facts wrong. He usually does. You'll get used to it. Comments like this one add nothing to the discussion and are plain out rude. Please keep it civil. Lwaxy

The Metro Detroit Gamers, probably most famous for producing one of the first published modules for D&D (The Lost caverns of Tsojconth in 1976 for Wintercon V) date back to '72 according to their website (which is also when the first Wintercon was held). It wouldn't be shocking to learn that...

This is true. And I used to do this a lot in the early days of 3rd Edition (having been influenced from years of playing the Storyteller system). But because the system has players calculate their skill totals using default attributes, there's a functionality issue in actual practice. The 5E...

Worry less about precision. The idea that people can get hyper-accurate measurements on a space just be walking through a space is an artifact of playing on battlemaps for years. So, in this situation, I would usually say something like "the hall goes about 20 or 30 feet down, then there's a...

The OED lists both seltic and keltic as acceptible pronunciations of Celtic, but only ser-see as the pronunciation of Circe. I did the same thing, but ended up pronouncing it hall-kee-on. (Which, ironically, would put it closer to the original Greek.) The other half of that is my pet peeve...

The planar city Sigil isn't pronounced like the word "sigil"? Holy :):):):). That's idiotic. That's even worse. Because "sigil", as written, is still pronounced exactly like "sijil".

10% on hit probability, damage, missile attacks 16% on bend bars/lift gates. 20% on physical saving throws 30% on mental saving throws and chance of spell failure 40% on resurrection survival 44% on system shock Sorry. I lost track of what we were talking about.

As far as I can tell from online forums, "modularity" refers to a magical fairy that will somehow divide by 0, rewrite your rulebooks based on a telepathic scan of your mind, and/or make house ruling suddenly possible again after a decade of gestapo thugs who would come by your house and murder...

Really? Then why did you immediately repeat it?

In your original post you stated that one DM could call for a Strength check while another might call for a Dexterity check. Now you're claiming that both DMs would just naturally call for a Strength check because, obviously, a Strength check is what you'd call for in this situation.

The character's so-called "knowledge" of the player or their ability to distinguish the decision-making process of the player is irrelevant. Allow me to repeat myself: They're not a real person. Their deductive ability to draw conclusions about what type of game mechanics the player is using is...

The fact that you think the mechanics exist in a completely separate box that doesn't interact with the game world in any way suggests that you are so firmly in love with dissociated mechanics that you are literally incapable of understanding any other mechanical paradigm. Yes. If you rewrote...

You do recognize that you're contradicting yourself, right?

Because a magic-user's spells aren't dissociated: The character knows that he prepared two fireball spells and can, therefore, only cast two fireball spells. The decision to use those fireball spells by the player is directly associated with the wizard's decision to cast them in the game world...

And it's very important to remember that B2 was a starter module. And, in fact, a very good starter module. Why? Because it immediately and viscerally taught the players that they had choices and those choices are important. The minute you enter the valley you are forced to choose an entrance...

It boils down to dissociated mechanics. If you're interested in playing a roleplaying game, then you want the mechanical decisions you're making as a player to be associated with the decisions your character is making. When you use dissociated mechanics, on the other hand, you aren't...

To clarify: I wasn't saying that 4E did. I was just commenting on the wider meme. Good rules support rulings. I agree with pretty much everything you said 100%.

The problem with rejecting the idea of asking the DM how to do something that isn't mechanically defined in the rules is that it throws out the one thing that makes RPGs unique from other games. It's not just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It's throwing the baby out and keeping the...

If I had to summarize my problems with 4E into three general bullet points, those bullet points would be: (1) The gameplay of D&D from 1974 thru 2008 was altered, with the D&D trademark being applied to a fundamentally different fantasy RPG. (2) Dissociated mechanics. (3) A complete...