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Strangely enough, that's the position many would accuse me of taking. That there is such a thing as fire and not the narrative of fire. I don't go so far, at least for the designing of games. I strongly doubt anyone advancing narrative absolutism would claim the Forge's ideas are discovered...

Charades, Pictionary, Scrabble, and Battleship are all competitive. You could feasibly even play some, like Scrabble or Battleship to beat yourself. Doing stuff isn't solely authorship unless we have no context to weigh it within. Games are rigorously balanced because players are seeking to...

I think attempts to explain deciphering the game resulted in concepts like immersion to demonstrate all the game elements whitewashed over a dozen years ago. And I don't deny since the activities of playing the game as I do are similar to activities we do when not playing a game, that exhibiting...

It's designed for them to game the situation once play has begun. Only that stuff was left unfinished, then brought out behind the screen, and we got a long practice of playing a wargame in front of a screen where at some point the referee has to quit being so and make stuff up. I would agree...

The hard part about deities and demigods is they are tied to the Alignment tracking mechanic and that isn't popularly used anymore. I think we should include it, but certainly alternate designs should be in place to. Maybe we could come up with mechanics that work differently for dealing with a...

My players love to build characters for 3rd edition, but we never seem to end up playing it. When we do it's usually straight to combat against other optimized opponents. That's because 3e doesn't do a good job of defining the game world for the players to play in, but excels at defining how to...

I apologize for the heat of my last post. It's been obvious we disagree about the most basic elements of what it means to play a game, play an RPG, and even role play for some time. Your game is about authorship - something only partial to playing a game, my game actually needs a game for the...

My mistake. But to be honest you wrote almost nothing about using Oriental Adventures for a game. You wrote all about making a story like a movie director might. Setting the scene. Framing the scene. What are the actors motivations in the scene. MacGuffins. Pacing. And how the outcome of the...

I like it. It was well thought out and an important topic for a game with clerics. I hate to be nitpicky, especially when so many of my answers to the questions lined up with others, but one question felt like an "All of the Above" almost all the time: 1. They worship many different gods on...

So all in the context. No problem. I got to write some stuff about how D&D is designed anyways. Where in your quoting of me was a question? I'll read them later, but I might not comment as the thread is running down. I think I skipped it as I did most of that edition. Seriously? Because it...

https://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4wand/20140219 This one's all about the gods and how they might intervene in your campaign world.

Not really. I mean, they are in story games where all mechanics are simply variants of the single mechanic used in all of them: 1. We both make up stories. 2. They are necessarily in conflct. 3. We use some variation to determine whose story gets added to the big story. So this mechanic is about...

I think of subclasses as vastly more campaign specific. I like it that a player can make up their whole entire class, but I would suggest playing a core class first and then aiming to specialize within it first for what they want. That way players get a big picture view before trying the unique...

I believe they wanted to expand what they believed was gaming and we therefore received hundreds of thousands of words in multiple rulebooks. By searching for a name to call this new game they found role playing from the military buffs who understood it as improving class competency, military...

I'm not claiming what the players in our hobby do. I'm suggesting the original game design was constructed for purposes other than what everyone uses it for, even long ago. That's is good and I've seen every type of the GNS players satisfied at the same D&D table, but in general the game...

Nilbogs live in Opposite Land. Slay Living is Raise Dead for Nilbogs. Save or Die poison fully heals them. Disintegrate regenerates lost body parts. There are plenty of other options.

As I use them Called shots allow attacks on a creature or other targets anatomy/composition. Called locations are more difficult to hit, but still affected individually by armor and damage usually the same - though the location's hit points are not. The important part is: called shots are not...

The difficulty is the game the players play to succeed against, or at least learn about enough to achieve their own objectives within. Player play to improve or beat a module just as I believe most video gamers play. If you run D&D as a shared activity for the players to tell a story, then you...

Referees in basketball only award a basket if the players actually put the ball through the hoop. That's what is gaining players/characters points in D&D. The referee doesn't fudge that a last point buzzer shot went in when it didn't, even though it would make a better story, because games...

I'm repeating myself from a week or so ago, but W1: The Crucible of Freya does a decent job of introducing how both adventure path and sandbox designs may be published in the same product. And different XP methods could be published to accommodate different DMing styles in the same work.