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From today's Penny Arcade: Tycho seems to have a solid grip on the narrative playing out, and how people choose their roles in the narrative. My ability to laugh at myself is fully restored thanks to this comic (a blessed relief). I can't wait to see the news post to see how close Gabe's...

This is true, but from reading the piece, I think the implicit assumption is that the PCs won't be buying Rare items. They'll be finding them in some crypt or being rewarded them by valorous service to the crown or whatever. So precise economic modeling of buying them is irrelevant, and the...

I find your ideas intriguing and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. For anyone at WotC who is reading, if you're looking to hire someone to do those jobs, I'm coming up on available. Years of academia need to eventually serve me in good stead somehow. In my experience (and...

Where, exactly, did you get that idea? I think I'm finally beginning to understand our inability to communicate, but I'm not even sure where to start unpacking that. The zero-sum thing is even more ridiculous than assuming that a specific type of system is "dear" to me. One of the greatest...

My metaphor was more about the time and energy investment in character creation. The example expressed a binary situation wherein players and games come in one of two types. Some people just want to get into character (construction paper sword guy), and some games serve that. Some people just...

Not at all. They're just defined cinematically. Stormtroopers are wicked scary to peasants on Tatooine and generic Rebel soldiers. They might as well be a Level 80 Elite Solo Brute when fighting such people. Effectively, they are, for narrative reasons, as much as anything. But once a Jedi...

That's an extreme caricature, again. Why are these discussions always packed to the top with absurdist false dichotomies? Maybe there's a middle ground where I have this ridiculous hat I found in a Caribbean tourist trap that simply screams "pirate" to me that I insist on digging out for such...

I'm not sure what you're trying to prove other than stating over and over that you don't like "builds" in games. Fine. But you keep stating, insinuating, or broadly implying that the mere presence of "builds" in and of itself hampers character concepts and character details. This is false...

Not really. It depends on the game and the table. Knitting is external to the 4e rules as written. And the rules relationship to the table work sort of like the U.S. Constitution relationship to the individual states. Whatever details are not laid out within the rules themselves are left to...

While I think that may end up being true for a lot of players, there's nothing preventing you from having a vast wealth of character details that exist entirely outside the rules. This was sometimes hard in 3e, since 3e sought to have rules for everything. So you couldn't, for example, be an...

ProfessorCirno, while I agree with much of what you said, humans actually are really, really bad at multitasking. Conservative estimates from recent data would suggest that you get 30-40% slower on each task if you are doing two things at once, for example, and if both of those tasks require...

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. All I really said was that his definitions are too limiting. He presented an either/or. EITHER the character is defined by numbers and abilities OR the character is defined by personality and background. This is a classic false dichotomy. We are...

False dichotomy is as false dichotomy does. The character can be all of those things at the same time. The character can be defined by his background, but he expresses that background and experience during combat via your choice of feats/powers/what-have-you. Even when you start with one or...

Didn't you get the memo? In games we like we are allowed to ignore fluff or even rules we don't want, creating any character we like. But in games we don't like, every piece of text written is an anchor around our necks that we cannot remove or change, a vile slap in the face. It the rule of...

The vitriol partially comes from the fact that there have been approximately 2 billion threads on this very topic, and every single one of them have brought out a spectrum of human personality disorders that is frankly terrifying. Intelligent discussion on the topic of game evolution is fine...

And hence I begin anticipating the day when books become obsolete and the game is simply allowed to evolve as needed via patches to a digital database. All this hair-splitting about what does and doesn't constitute a new edition has actually made me wish for the demise of books. :erm: May you...

Since most mechanics are separate from each other, as per exception-based design, you modify or remove the offending power. But most of the time I've found that when someone balks at how a power works, simply coming up with a different flavor explanation for the mechanical effect gets them over...

The problem with 3e, of course, was chaos theory, IME. You alter the model, and since everything uses the same rules, it changes things elsewhere. Some of those are obvious and expected, which is reinforcing and pleasing. Of course, some of the changed things were less obvious. You flap a...

Choosing mechanics is indistinguishable from building the personality for me. Sometimes it's a matter of finding mechanics to hang on a pre-existing character idea, and sometimes an interesting mechanic begs for character hooks/personality traits/etc to go with it. I've built many characters...

Aye, the price is more or less prohibitive. Otherwise, it would be a very nice gateway drug.