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I'm taking his statement to be nonsensical, like a guy wondering whether he should eat just food or whether he should eat just vegetables. No matter what you're doing you're eating food! Actually it's even worse than that and I'm not sure how to analogize it so here it is straight. There is no...

I dunno. The asphalt court down the block with the chain-link fence doesn't have a shot clock. The thing about the shot clock is, the guy who came up with it looked at games where players weren't being ball-hogging foul-drawing turtle-men and said "okay, 120 shots seems to make for a pretty...

Heh, ask me a hard one next time. ;) I value my choice OF edition highly enough to spend 8 hours a week prepping and playing it. I'm betting you do too. But the only person I can ever prove it's "more right" to is myself. I'm like a guy pretending to hold a conversation with his dog because it...

d20 Modern? REALLY? Maybe you missed the part where I said there was such a thing as "bad crunch". d20 Modern introduced a new mechanic, Wealth, which doesn't do at all what it says on the label (model gear progression). It also tried to make two creaky mechanics from 3E even more load-bearing...

The whole bit where you can talk about barbecuing burgers in your backyard and I understand what you mean kind of puts lie to this. If a McDonalds hamburger were really objectively better supermarkets wouldn't carry ground beef and hamburger buns since everybody would be going to McDonalds. A...

I focused on 4E specifically because its recovery mechanic is so drastically different from 3E. In 3E I agree the waters are a lot muddier with respect to what hit points actually represent. But in 4E there's less wiggle room, explcitly because: Yes, 1 HP from negative bloodied a PC can roll a...

Okay, here's the thing. Legolas? Written by one dude. Conan? Written by one dude. How many dudes are sitting down at your gaming table? HINT: it is more than one. This is not to say that collaborative storytelling doesn't exist. Of course it does. It's called improv. But the problem with improv...

...is this a trick question? Your psychopath pirate would attempt to violently murder any "good guy". That's why the PCs are all dressed up in the first place, and I assume their Disguise beat the relevant people's Spot. The dwarf can take one of three approaches. First, he can present himself...

Hey go check the end of that thread there's a surprise. SPOILERS:

A right thing fulfills the purpose it sets out to fulfill. The purpose of a game is to satisfy its players. The purpose of paying to watch a game is to be satisfied by watching it. More players were satisfied with (you could even say "enjoyed") the new shot-clock-enabled basketball, and more...

You wanna talk about sports? Okay. Let's talk about sports. Let's talk about basketball. Did you know basketball didn't originally have a shot clock? It's true. The team that was ahead would often just hold onto the ball forever, and the team that was behind would deliberately foul their...

Here's the problem: you can do that in 3rd ed. Heck, when they release the druid class you can do it in 4th ed. Why the hell not. You have players who are okay with it, fine, go nuts. But let's assume you had some players who weren't okay with the idea of, say, driving two hours for the...

In 4E, that other interpretation is wrong. Nothing about it fits the way people recover from those kind of injuries. You are not slowed if you have a mangled leg, you are not weakened if you have a mangled arm, and it is not easier for you to take a bleeding wound and/or pass out, as it would be...

First of all, you can be up and running in 5 minutes after you've been "beaten within an inch of your life", assuming you have either 4 healing surges or a slightly smaller number and a friendly leader archetype. Faced with your own initial story of what happened - "I was a pile of mangled limbs...

I just run a giant random dungeon. I roll it up far enough ahead of time that I can explain what the various rooms and passages really represent (sometimes they end up looking like an open field in front of a ruined keep or a ship that dropped onto a forest from 10,000 feet) but that's about it...

What's this "middle ground" stuff, kemosabe? There IS no middle ground. The question is being asked wrong. Here's the right question: which would you rather do? - given a stable numerical relationship, tell a story - given a story, intuit a stable numerical relationship You would rather do...

Well, yes, and the point I was trying to make but, uh, forgot to actually say in there goes something like this: Designers are responsible for the math and its consequences, not GMs and not players. They, and not the players, have the opportunity to test the math out when it isn't important to...

The problem with the rogue is that as designed he's the skill guy. The problem with skills is that they're binary - either you sneak past the patrol or you don't, either you climb the wall or you can't, either you disarm the swinging blade or IT CUTS JOO, et cetera. This means that, after...

If the dragon were intended to have claws digging into the ground so I can't move him, he would have been created with the Claws Digging Into the Ground power, perhaps as a passive ability which reduces the distance of all pushes, pulls, and slides, or as an immediate interrupt to an effect...

The problem is that people, in general and usually in specific, are actually geniuses in storytelling but absolute pants at math. Quite often the GM can't make a judgment until several sessions have gone by that Minmaxed Character A is not built in a way to allow his player to have any fun --...