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Yet maybe she would: "Despite the crumbly rock and unsure footing, you make it to the top....". This narration efficiently does two things at once: it correctly narrates the check outcome and also serves to telegraph to anyone else thinking of trying that climb that it maybe ain't as easy as it...

So, to sum up the now-legendary break into the house scenario, we have: --- a thief or burglar about which nothing is known (species, size, degree of skill, etc.) --- an undetermined time of day (majority vote here seems to be 2 am) --- the thief is attempting to break into a decent-size...

Unless you can destroy the chest, unscrew the lock from the chest, take the hinges off the chest, or somehow use magic (there's many options) to open the chest and-or get the grenade out. Or unless (if you have time) you go and find a better lock-picker. Or unless you can find another way of...

What's that line about the best weapon being the weapon you never have to fire?

Where I consider it poor play by the players. If nothing happens, it's on them to find or create a way to make something happen. Only in the extremely-rarest of circumstances will that be impossible.

The play was hectic at times for the players but sure didn't seem so for him. :) If he talked much about prior runs of the game I didn't catch it (I was running on GenCon sleep cycle i.e. barely any sleep for three days at game time), but he did give us the story about how he came up with the...

Exactly. I'm reading a book at the moment - an enjoyable story so far other than that the amount of contrivance, where the protagonists arrive at just the right place at the right time for something to happen, is already becoming very annoying.

Revitalize?

I've taken the liberty of adding numbers to your list below, to make it easier to speak to specific points without having to retype or paraphrase each one. Points 1 through 4 - bang on. Point 5 - game mechanics and abstractions are often more a "necessary evil", play can't functionally happen...

If that's the case - that the D&D system itself isn't doing any simulating and is instead getting out of the way so the DM and players can do the simulating themselves such that the players feel like they're acting in a real place - doesn't that in fact make it a very good system for simulation?

Which is a glaring error of omission in the blog's scene-set. Time of day (or night) makes a pretty big difference to almost everything about the scene, from likelihood of people being awake/alert in the house to ease of a passerby observing the lockpicker to etc. etc.; thus rendering...

Well, unarmoured Elves and Hobbits are stealthy. Rangers are more observant. Never mind Monks, who use an entirely different surprise mechanic bespoke to the class. I thought the same. Then again, 5e "surprise" mechanics are a bit of a jumble anyway; as if the system almost wants to do away...

Maybe; but in fairness my in-the-moment example didn't go that far back. But unless the area is known to be almost dead flat, an occasional low ridge or valley would seem reasonable.

Someone has to write a song now: "The Lone Wolf of Quantum Ridge".

From the perspective of the abstracted gameplay, however, it doesn't matter if you dodged the swing completely and took no damage or blocked the swing with your shield and took no damage. Now, one could argue that these two outcomes should be mechanically different; that the shield itself, for...

Sure they have - they've simulated the feeling-out process where combatants size each other up and see what the other is made of, and now they're about to get to the part where each significant blow really hurts or even kills outright. Even more so in a 4e paradigm where your example puts...

Exactly - the presence/absence of a cook is unrelated to the success/fail of the door being opened. I would. Absent other pre-narrated considerations, "nothing happens" would be by far the most likely. :)

They'd meet fewer potential encounters (i.e. less rolls) per day, but the trip would take a lot longer because all that searching for tracks and detouring around waterholes slows them down.

Easy to just make DR cumulative per round, so if you've got DR 5 and take 12 points damage in a round you still take 7 whether it all came in one hit or from 12 different applications of 1 point each.

Braunstein required a fair bit of prep and intro from the GM to get things going, but (when I played it, anyway, with Wesely as GM) once play began the GM pretty much just sat there and did nothing the whole time other than watch. Afterwards, he gave a five-minute rundown of what we'd done...