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House-ruling a board game (other than Monopoly, which is chronically house-ruled in unproductive ways) is pretty rare. Further, a board game is--perhaps--a few hours' entertainment or lack thereof. It's trivial to not play it again with that person. If you're the GM of a D&D game, you're...

Is it "not supposed to happen" in D&D? That implies there are things that are and aren't "supposed to happen" in D&D. Where do you derive this certainty from? I presume it would need to be something even more inarguable than the rules, since I know your stance is that the GM is the absolute...

Well, House MD isn't Sherlock. By being a different character, even if he is inspired by the (crappy) interpretations of Sherlock Holmes, it's quite a bit easier to swallow that he would behave as he does. House is a semi-pro cynic with various emotional traumas and severe physical pain pretty...

I'm saying it needs to be one or the other--and the character needs to remain consistent from one instance to the next. If player A can declare that their character simply cannot be convinced to drink, then the players cannot get mad that there are things NPCs simply cannot be persuaded to do...

I can't say I'm surprised that you would cavalierly destroy the things that make your players enjoy your game in order to uphold perfect fidelity to the feeling of verisimilitude. Player enjoyment of the experience is not the most important goal.

I mean I feel like this is a pretty straightforward yes/no question. If you had to choose between ruining a player's experience, destroying the thing that makes them enjoy playing their character, but preserving perfect fidelity to the feeling of verisimilitude, vs making a small (I emphasize...

Because I would be able to give actual, concrete examples I have personally played or run, rather than pure hypotheticals. I don't understand this answer either. How is that not still under the GM's purview? Again, I just want to reiterate: You would rather trash the things a player loves...

It 100% comes across as extremely flippant about player investment and preferences, yes, and treating the player's enjoyment of the game as secondary to the austere purity of the feeling of "verisimilitude". (Because, as I've personally brought up in this very thread, there are commonly-held...

But I thought "ask the DM every time" was the correct and intended thing for D&D 5e? Like that was literally all people could talk about back when 5e launched. Every single thread asking for advice, without fail, had one of the first 10 (sometimes the first five) responses be some variation of...

No. The point was, if it is on the table in the first place, it must have been possible to begin with. If it wasn't possible to begin with, it never should have been on the table in the first place. These two things are logically equivalent, as they are contrapositives of one another. ("If A...

So verisimilitude is more important than players enjoying the characters they wish to enjoy.

Short-and-sweet name for a useful thing to do when figuring out what a group wants from a game (e.g., something to deploy during Session Zero). "Lines" are things that, if crossed, would break the experience. "Veils" are things that are okay to occur, but not much "on camera", so to...

I'd say the signal to noise ratio isn't great, but when you do get signal, it's something good. Panning for gold, one might say; a single nugget is worth many hours of sand.

Fully agreed. There definitely sounds like some desire to have one's cake and eat it too, here, from those waving the "player agency" flag now. (Funny how little player agency mattered previously, eh?) The player gets to decide every time, all the time, what their character would or wouldn't...

I know of no system where "fail forward" is codified and could ever be used to introduce a complication that doesn't make sense. Such systems begin from their very foundation by saying that you should do things like, as PbtA games put it, "begin and end with the fiction", for example. If...

I wasn't the one who called it railroading. Others did, and you granted it. You had agreed with pemerton that it was being used to keep the story, in his words, "keeping things 'on the rails'"; to which your reply was: Were you disputing that this was railroading, and simply did not choose to...

I mean I can tell you but it's so specific I don't think it will be helpful. I was running may adaptation of the very excellent The Gardens of Ynn supplement, keeping most of the setting mechanics but adapting it to Dungeon World rules and the needs of my game (which is in the style of the...

Well. All I can say is, I have an extremely low opinion of whatever "principles" undergird railroading. But I will emphasize that "railroading", as I use the term, isn't a good thing. It's inherently manipulative, though not necessarily deceptive. People who knowingly and openly want a linear...

I don't understand how FF could ever...not be kept in the GM's control. It's purely expressed in how GMs frame scenes where someone failed to achieve something they wanted to achieve. How could that ever be anything else...? I'm truly confused here.

... So, let me get this straight. You want me to give you demonstrations of Fail Forward...in the contexts where that technique appears... But you demand that it ONLY be examples from campaigns specifically using D&D? Are you serious?