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How is it not playing the game right? All prep is being honoured. All mechanical interactions are being resolved in accordance with the principles and rules agreed by the table. All action declarations are being made in good faith and are being resolved in good faith. The location may be one...

Are we allowed to call principles what we like? Like Blorb, for example? Secondarily, it's entirely possible for the game to be being played but both the players and characters to end up bored. For example, the characters are searching for a secret door. Due to other principles, the GM is...

So, stop engaging about it? If you aren't interested, just drop the topic?

And how in the first use of the term, spell levels and character levels are not the same thing or gained at the same rates (in all but one D&D edition), despite the underlying meaning being similar. The point is more that shorthand terminology that needs interpreting in the context of the...

What does level mean?

I'd agree with that - I think it's probably possible to come up with "worst practices" but I don't think best practices would be negations of those things.

Or alternatively it's advice against certain styles of GMing, for example "soft railroading" where successes aren't honoured because it's not felt that the win has been "earned" yet, leading to repeated tests until failure. It can be argued that it's just fairly standard good GMing advice but...

Right - this is something that makes sense in the context of games in a specific context where leveraging certain types of power alters the inter-party balance. To offer a recent example where this hasn't been a problem in a game of Vampire I'm in at the moment, we have a highly placed lawyer...

We could for example be trying to evoke a certain genre - in 7th Sea for example it cost build points to have character flaws but you gain XP for whenever they cause your character trouble. The actual implementation of this was fairly ropey, but the point was to encourage players to take...

Depending on the household, certainly. The cook may well not be involved in serving the food at all, that may well be the job of other servants.

I mean, you are asking him to coin new jargon here rather than using well understood terms from outside of the hobby - given the general tenor against academic terms and desire for casual communication, that seems counterproductive.

As an aside on the crumbling cliff thing - why would we narrate such a thing in the first place? We know it's to provide a narrative reason to explain the mechanical failure on the check, but we've got a wide suite of reasons why to could be. We could narrate that the climber's grip gave out...

It doesn't even need to be a sustained period - given how short 5e levels 1 and 2 can be in terms of encounters it's very straightforward for them to be obtained over a day or two for which we can account for all of the Wizards time. The point is that there are no rules as to what actions a...

Agreed, though it's fairly trivial to conceive of a situation whereby the knocking off of the mask is the salient thing (perhaps it is valuable, or magical, perhaps it is the source of the difficulty in the scenario) whereas the identity of the wearer isn't (our party of right thinking...

I think the point here is that the GM has to agree with the stakes first - it's not that the roll is made and then on a success the player has free rein to say what the runes are, it's that the players and GM before agree that the request is reasonable (so authorship is shared) so on a success...

It's been a while, but I think it was the party was stuck outside a secret door and the adventure couldn't continue till they found it, so everyone was standing around awkwardly till someone rolled high enough to find it.

Didn't we get an example of this in one of the 5e launch streams? Something like Acquisitions Incorporated?

It's not quite player rolls or dm rolls - it's attacker rolls or defender rolls. The example in the 3e UA is player rolls, but it's extensible. We are talking about miss for half damage, I agree. I use the 3e UA rules to convert saves into attacks vs defences. I cast a fireball at a...

I think @Maxperson covers this, but I'm talking about the case when reshuffling saves to attacks on defences. This is nearly identical mechanically, takes precisely the same fictional inputs and delivers precisely the same fictional outputs. The only mechanical difference is who physically...

Perhaps I'm not being clear here. I'm not even talking about a narrativist case here, just purely 3/5e D&D. In basic operation of the game, if I make a normal physical attack, I miss if I do not beat the AC of my target with the sum of my attack bonus and die roll. If I convert saves to...