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It may also not be paranoia so much as making a "strictly good" decision. I mean, if you don't search for traps, you might get nailed by one. If you do, then either you find a trap, or don't, and if you don't you're just as badly off as you were before. Introducing random encounters is a bad...

To offer a counterpoint, take Kurt Buseik, and his comic, "Astro City". In the prelude to one of the collections, he says that people often write him, praising his comic for how realistic it is. And then he says, basically, "realistic? It's got shapechanging aliens and a giant ice kingdom full...

Those are ways you can model shock and your character's ability to recover from it. Actually, maybe shock is the wrong word there. The term I'm looking for I don't believe actually exists in English or maybe even language, but there's an adjective, and it is "sudden". Damage is "a suddenness"...

Well, more unbelievable, how about? Believability's kind of an uncanny valley thing, where realistic things like tiny scorpions are believable, and patently unrealistic things like giant scorpions that eat thunder et cetera are believable under their own weird logic, but something that's not...

It's actually a symptom of a greater desire, to be a) contrarian and b) right. Here is the simplest illustration of this desire. At character creation, the GM says "Okay, you're all in a castle split between two factions. There's the King, who supports order, and the Queen, who favors chaos...

Giant poisonous scorpions are more fantastic than giant lightning-clawed poison-tailed scorpions. (Or if you've got kobolds inadvisably feeding them scraps from the hold of a ship that fell out of the Astral Sea, giant star-clawed mindcrush-tailed scorpions.) Scorpions that eat thunder and crap...

What? Why? Damage represents shock. Not the electrical kind, the socked-in-the-heart-with-a-boxing-glove kind. Hit points are your capacity to absorb shock and stay conscious. Generally you can shake off shock if you can sit down and rest for a few minutes, but sometimes there's just not enough...

Okay, skill have about three levels of proficiency. LEVEL 1: Checks with a level bonus, maybe an incidental stat. LEVEL 2: Checks with a primary stat, or skill training, or a racial bonus and a secondary stat. LEVEL 3: Checks with skill training and: a primary stat, or a racial/skill focus...

Hey man, you don't know what that ladder's been up to! It could have been adventuring in the Elemental Chaos and getting ethereal rungs and a frame made of elemental water! :lol: But seriously, just like the classic Oblivion Scaling -- which might actually have gone unnoticed if not for like...

Yeah, and "real" heroes don't get "light armor" if they want good AC and good maneuverability at the same time, either. They save up for mithral. It's not like the designers actually intended to allow you to add your Dex or Int bonus to your AC in "light armor" or anything. You realize how...

What? Color spray and even Grease render you pretty helpless on a failed save, and they're level 1. Hold Person is level 2. Granted, in those cases it's more like "save or wait to die" but still.

I think you may have just solved your own problem. Yeah, I'm a bit curious here, what besides "strength vs. AC" constitutes a martial attack?

Really it depends where you want to go with the story. If you'd rather just have this be the end of it, the pirates are convinced this was a fluke so the new guys will be easy meat and the second guy to realize this puts a dagger in the back of the first guy and the entire town erupts in a giant...

As far as that goes I agree. After all a game is intended to let you experience the same sort of struggle you might face in real life but with the consequences taken out. However 4E is also intended to be more improv-friendly, explicitly giving tips to the DM based on tenets of improv theater...

The "wrought iron fence made of tigers" is cited as a general reference to a specific example: having received a clue pointing to a location which Yahtzee is already aware exists, he is nonetheless prohibited from going there because Sir Hurf Of Durf needs to wander over into another screen and...

Well, it's really several studies. You can pick a bone with whichever one you choose. It starts with GA Miller's seminal presentation on the limits of human working memory, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two", originally published in the 1956 Psychological Review. From there is the...

So, none of these people were ever surprised when they rolled a 20, or dismayed when they rolled a 1 (or the opposition rolled a 20), because in both cases it was something they'd planned for? I'm betting no. It's one thing to understand the math, and another to actually use it. Absent...

It is not possible for the average human to give realistic weight to any probability outside of the realm of about one in 8. Maybe you could get down to one in 16, one in 32, with a lifetime of training. When somebody is making a choice with unpredictable consequences they will not be able to...

I have a defender... and an insane melee striker who gets behind enemy lines. Flanking has not been a problem for them as of yet, but I haven't run any combats with large numbers of enemies yet. As far as cover goes, current rules seem to work alright for it, just with 6 corners instead of 4...

So there's no random outcome you don't think is too outlandish to be implicitly accepted by sitting down to play, and no chance however small that you don't think people will consider it? Cognitive research puts lie to the second one in a big way. Tversky's work on human perception of...