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I was thinking of a case where the group goes through their old village in the course of the game, and suddenly who and what their family is actually has some bearing, something it wouldn't have generically had. But your situation with your daughter sounds similar. I've seen GMs would...

Me being me, I'd rather more bluntly answer "Yes, and we're allowed to tell you you're being a jerk in how you do it." But then, as my wife says, I'm rarely passive-aggressive.

I tend to do it immediately because its too common for people to view it as precedent. Unless I just flat out miss it of course (I just found a rule I--and everyone else in the game--had missed in my 13th Age game that's I've probably been running every other week for a year now, and for half...

May be, but if the game system as I understand it seems to make something impractical, I think its the GMs duty to make it clear that's not how he's running it (i.e. he has effective houserules here, even if he doesn't write them down). I don't feel that playing a guessing game in something...

I don't know how it tends to be these days, but at least at one time the important word in this sentence would have been "should".

I suspect in the case of the people I'm talking about, there are whole elements in superhero settings they wouldn't be able to engage with. But then, I also, from what I know of you, would find it surprising if you got soggy about someone filling in some elements about their family in a fantasy...

I think this is at least slightly overoptimistic. I've seen people tell gaming stories where it was clear that all it did was make them remember it felt lame at the time, too.

I've seen people get sticky about players defining, even fairly broadly, NPCs in the village their character grew up in. Its really incredibly bright-line for some people (I don't know how they'd engage with the necessary expansions you need to do when creating most characters in a superhero...

You also need to watch out for people who are prone to not pushing back on things they may be dubious about, or worse, people who genuinely think they're good with things that in play, they find out they don't like.

Some of the most extensive optimization I've ever seen was in superhero games, where the genre conventions run from low to no lethality, because part of that genre is, of course, about power fantasy, so getting the character such that it feels like it has that proper edge of competence is...

Yeah, I knew Skarsgard was a good actor, but I had no idea how well he'd end up engaging with the titular character. I also think Dastmalchien is particularly good as Gurathin, a character that is tricky to not make unsympathetic.

I'd suspect its more or less a realism/intuition issue. With most weapons there's a blunt element that could be engaged (flat of the blade, haft of the axe, pick your poison) whereas the majority of ranged weapons you see in the game are launching bolts, arrows or throwing weapons like javelins...

If I didn't want system to serve the game purposes, I'd go back to freeform roleplaying.

The first half of that's easy to do, but the second not so much, especially given how schematic a lot of non-combat mechanics in a lot of games tend to be.

There's a problem in some games that its not clear what to do with prisoners. If you're in an ongoing travelling adventure, or one where there's going to be a set of short-order combats, you can easily and safely drag prisoners along; this applies to a lot of D&D and adjacent adventures, but...

And that's an excuse often pulled out by someone who wants to play the Brave lone Truthteller. If you think people on this board hesitate to tell others on it they're wrong all the time, I don't know what board you've been reading.

Well, in the past I wouldn't likely have had the statblocks there; in my non-digital days, I'd just have had the framing notes and looked up any non-original monsters in the appropriate books when I used them. And of course different kinds of campaigns would require different levels of prep...

Contrary to what some people will tell you, a large enough collection anecdotes are data unless you distrust the whole population the anecdotes are from. So when one person tells you X and twenty people tell you Y, its not generally the one person you should be going by, and that's true even if...

"Why" is because they consider their play cycle about simplifying and resolving a situation, not making it worse. They don't want additional complications to occur as a consequence of their actions. That's not the same thing as wanting none in the first place. Its the difference between going...

The problem of course is that there's no assurance that the GM won't just add the lieutenant in to the later fight when he otherwise wouldn't have him out of some sense of authenticity or drama. There are enough GMs who actively reject active attempts to do game balance that's not a given.