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It's likely that this is your opinion, but I think you're misusing the word "prove" here. If they weren't identified then no one would know enough about it to destroy it. The cursed -1 sword sits on a forgotten battlefield somewhere, or in some armory, and remains undetected. Not every NPC...

Also - "challenging on it's own merits" to me means that each individual encounter must pose a significant (measurable) chance of killing a PC. This is something that continues to be disputed by at least some of the pro-per-encounter people, so how is it now that this is treated as an...

What's it mean to design an encounter "just" right in a game where you're rolling dice and the players are the ones that get to decide on their actions? Worse, what if the players get to decide how they approach the encounter? What if one time they scout properly and manage to prepare spells...

Resource attrition does not, by definition, "outright kill the PCs", so I don't really follow the reasoning here.

Agreed. If the way you make a spell work in the game is to cheat then I think the spell needs to change, at least for your game. It's more fair to the players.

Ok. But teleport is available to 9th level characters. So if you change fly to a 5th level spell, you're still going to have to design castles to deal with flying opponents for when the PCs reach 9th level. Unless 9th level character's aren't supposed to deal with castles, or fly is supposed...

What is the "contrived problem"? Is it that there are certain obvious ways of solving certain problems in the game world? Not wanting to get hit with sharp weapons, for example, causes fighters to wear armor. Castles have those little crenellations on the wall so that archers can hide behind...

I'm sorry if anyone felt, because of this sentence, that I was wholesale dismissing their contribution to the conversation. It's not uncommon that I feel that folks aren't always discussing things in good faith - sometimes their memory about what was said or what the other person means seems a...

Yes, I really meant "deadly per unit of playing time". Life is 100% deadly over a long enough time period. :) I don't see how what RC and I are saying is different on this particular topic exactly. Per-encounter resource situation (combined with the general nature of my game style, I...

That's like saying that swinging a sword in a battle is meaningless. You're reasoning here is circular, because there's no reason that successfully camping is meaningless in a game where success at it is critical to the mission, which presumably has huge amounts of meaning. The issue of...

I've said this a few times, I'm running out of ways of making it clearer. First, under *any* paradigm, a risk of "something bad" (death, for example) must be present for players to worry about their characters. That seems logical to me. And nothing I've said contradicts this, so I don't...

Ogre facing Swashbuckler: "So, you're using Captain Caveman's two-handed overhead smash against me?" Dragon facing Swashbuckler: "So you're using Smaug's Swoop and Swallow against me?" I think for a duelling game, the opposing maneuvers thing would be interesting, but for a DnD game where a...

AFAICT This misses the point of what the concept of "hit points" represents. The "coup de grace" rules look like they do for this reason. In those rules, there's no question that the person taking the damage is not doing any sort of accelerating (or moving at all). Being hit with a fireball...

This is the only part of this that I question. We're talking about biological systems here, so the force require to break ribs and stave them into someone's internal organs is some X factor - force short of that X-factor is going to cause signicantly less damage to a creature than one beyond it.

You mean you didn't read all 1000+ posts on this thread!? :D I personally have responded to them and so have others. I'll perhaps summarize what I've already said at a later time but you have some more interesting stuff here so I'll get to that first. And this, to me, is the beginning and...

"Context", in the "context" of what we were talking about earlier took on a more narrow definition of that part of the encounter design that was supposed to make an encounter interesting when you remove the threat of death from an encounter under a per-encounter resource system. I don't know if...

How do you know the force without knowing the acceleration? And without knowing the elasticity of the ground (and person hitting the ground) how do you know the acceleration? I suppose you were using an average distance between striking the ground and coming to a stop here? Not that you're...

Yea, and hold up a sign saying "uh oh" :) I don't really know what he'd do, whereas there is plenty of variability, it seems, with combat. I suppose if you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a fall? I can live with falling doing just hp damage, for the reasons that you point out but it just...

I guess I did. In fact I just scanned the page again and I still don't see it. Sorry, didn't mean to be rude. In the process of breaking down arguments into manageable chunks, I'm often having to provide a specific example or counter-example to a point. This is not intended to be a...

I'll add - it seems pretty natural to me to imagine that the combination of an intelligent, aggressive BBEG with a dynamic environment and a 24-hour (or close) rest period will almost certainly produce a very natural seeming set of consequences, many of them dire. Contrast this with (arguably...