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I'd be interested in hearing your critique if you have the time and desire. Anyway, I agree with what you've written about plot hooks. I was under the (mistaken) impression that you were saying every encounter in the game should be or lead to a plot hook.

I'm not sure what you mean by plot hook here. For example, in the last game I played, one PC wanted to get a shield made. She didn't have the cash to buy it, so she tried to awe the shield maker with her frost giant's daughter's daughter physique. I interpreted the Reaction Roll as having the...

I think skill challenges are okay - well, at least the general concept of them - if the fictional area is abstract. If you can't make a map of it. If you can see all the detail, then a skill challenge will not work as well as general action resolution. I think social conflict with NPCs falls...

How is it going, Inchoroi?

I use a version of 4E's skill challenges. First I make a Reaction Roll. It's based off the B/X Reaction Roll table but expanded for WotC-D&D CHA modifiers. 3d6 Roll + Charisma Modifier Reaction Successes 4 or less Extremely hostile, no dialogue possible -- 5-8 Hostile, possible attack...

I believe that D&D's combat rules came out of miniature war games, and as a result are very fictionally abstract. No one is going to spend the time to narrate the actions of every spearman on the line! Because of that, D&D has never made the details of what your character does important to...

Concrete Rules: I may have been the one saying that D&D combat is abstract. While I do agree that the rules on concrete, the abstraction happens in the "fiction": you can't be sure of what's happening in the game world until the dice are rolled and compared to AC and HP. Player Agency: I'm...

I don't think that's true: players don't have the same ability to define precisely what their PC is doing in combat. If you shoot a lever to depress it from a distance, roll above the DC, and the DM says, "You hit and your arrow barely grazes the lever", that would strike me as an odd ruling...

My thought is that you could get pretty radical with that and cut out initiative and NPC turns. That would be a major hack though. I think it's because D&D combat is very abstract, while ability checks (especially in 5E, for various reasons) are generally more grounded in what the characters...

I numbered the questions. 1. I think it's fun, it flows out of what the characters are doing in the game world. 2. Looks like it. 3. I would be worried that it would be difficult to make choices in the future. I wouldn't know if the DM was going to make rulings like this or rely on the...

My view is different. Games provide decisions for players to make. They weight those decisions through their mechanics. While D&D is unique in that a lot of those decisions are based on imagined content (fiction), it still weights decisions - obviously, because otherwise you wouldn't have any...

For me the question is "What decision did they make here?" It seems to me that they made the decision to travel at a normal pace. In the context of a dungeon or very dangerous wilderness (or urban, I guess) environment that is a meaningful decision. If it's not a dangerous wilderness...

I personally take it a little further. I think the players need a way to judge the risk of potential encounters before they encounter them. Similar to the general paradigm of deeper dungeon levels = more risk, I believe that the players need some kind of information like that in other...

I am not sure if this is the same situation, but it reminds me of a game I played some years back. The DM would give us a choice of two equally-deadly linear dungeons to adventure in. We didn't have much way to avoid or alleviate the deadliness of the encounters. Treasure was sparse and XP...

Some questions... How many options do you have for adventure? Are there dungeons scattered about or do you take on only what the DM's prepared for that session? If there are multiple options, do they all have the same level of risk? How much time do you have to complete these adventures -...

That's a shame; I have trouble wrapping my head around that point of view so I like to hear more about it. One of the other values I see for rules is that they add some texture to the world: spells are cast like this, orcs are like that, fighters can do these things, etc. It satisfies the...

That's an interesting response. Personally I see the same value from rules (in general): the default mode that usually results in fulfilling the Goals of Play. (That's not the only value I see for rules in general, but an important one.) I probably put more weight on the rules; I believe...

What if I put it this way: If the Goals of Play are the overriding principles of play - so that if any rule at any time violates them, the rule should be disregarded in favour of the Goals of Play - then what value do the other rules give you? I can see the value that the other rules would have...

Couldn't you resolve everything in the game this way? If so, what do you need the rules for? Or a DM/player divide? If not, why not?

Would it be that hard to do everything simultaneously in 5E? I run a system like that. It's pretty simple: everyone declares their actions at the same time. If you attack another character you roll, otherwise you don't. Based on your action you apply modifiers to the roll; I don't know if...