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Okay, gotcha. Reading other posters repeating jargon from the Big Model doesn't help whether folks know where the ideas came from or not. I will definitely work on presentation. I'm not trying to spread my ideas as the way things are either. But when I've denied the ideas before I've been pushed...

How did I piss the Jester off? That's not my intent here. Presenting an alternate view of what D&D is to the storygaming philosophy isn't denying another philosophy the possibility it may be more accurate. I'm simply trying to pry open some other ways of viewing our game so games like early D&D...

There is no shared fiction being created in D&D. There is no "cloud" where we collectively create a story in and that's the big difference between what storygames do and what almost every other game does. D&D has a board. It's hidden behind the screen by the referee and abstracted into a series...

Let me ease your mind here then, I'm not suggesting players ever need play D&D for a sole purpose. I'm suggesting removing "the illusion of experience points", the scoring of our game, from the mechanics of the game should not be the default mode of play. Scores help players determine if they...

I prefer initiative rolled every round. It adds variation and greater unpredictability. However, this makes the game longer and without the option to share roll anything or use a Caller than D&D players working together are going to be hamstrung. Everyone will be re-rolling only individual...

I mean that most of it is playing a game / deciphering a code. In Chess and most every game that's directly about game play and not something else, like sports athletes, this is almost everything players do. They play Tic-Tac-Toe in what I long ago termed Tic Phase. They are still trying to...

OSR games are any games that came out of the blogging revolution of gamers who like the 1000s of games from the 70s to the 90s which aren't represented in game design much anymore. Personally I see old school games to be about playing the games as games and being like wargames hidden behind GM...

This one from Google seems fine enough. D&D comes from wargames where the rules were a model of war. D&D took those and used them for fantasy, but the rules were still fantasy as physics, a world which followed certain designs however much we may never completely discern them. Look at the...

When ideas are conflated, like attempting to make games into stories and vice versa, I find it's important to deny attempts to make life more uniform. The consequences are almost always a world where we annihilate other ways of thinking for what's being called one true way philosophies, in this...

Creating isn't the same as pretending nor is creating necessarily making a story. Stories are not inevitable. Going for a run, existing in any way, doesn't necessarily result in a story. That's confined thinking IMO and not cool to cultures who don't have stories. Don't allow literary theory to...

Okay, I will tone down the responses. It's hard to understand why a thread calling for D&D to quit being a game, at least by default, has become the norm and game play is considered oddball thinking. IME, storytelling isn't playing a game like making up rules isn't following them. Can people...

I agree that they should get the same abilities by race and class and be open to the same economy of items, dungeon treasures, monsters to fight, and so on. But NPCs are only and ever going to behave as the rules have defined them to behave. PCs are the results of people playing the game. That...

Telling a story isn't some fundamentalist inevitability. Don't pretend and you won't be telling a story. The objective in games that aren't storygames isn't to tell a story. In fact that's not the objective of most storygames either as objectives in games are achieved. Going for a run is fun and...

FYI, playing a game, even D&D, isn't about expressing a story. There is no "creating a shared fiction" in RPGs. It's about playing the game and if you don't want players who want to know the score, don't play a game. XP aren't a reward. They're a score. Just like the ability scores. A player...

Take away classes and you don't have a role playing game. Which is fine, but I think people are here to role play.

Death at -10 is really a good idea for players who are new to the game. Also, B1 is not a finished module. You as a DM need to complete it before it's ready to play. That should be fun. Enjoy it and put in some cool stuff. The world should have wilderness and town too, not just dungeon...

3e created a character creation game before the actual game that was probably more popular than the rest of the system, at least for some folks. If building overwhelming PCs is the game they like, then that's what they probably expect from you. Ask them. Do they want standard monsters to...

Think of XP as Gold Pieces for Dungeon! the boardgame. A lot of D&D elements came from that game including differing XP requirements.

Shoulders and ears are called shots. If her armor were so worn, it was destroyed I would say it pierced the armor. Or if the arrow were armor piercing. Or the arrow was in a different phase from metals I would say it passed through the chainmail. Or... etc. 3 Hit Points damage from the arrow is...

tl;dr XP is your roleplaying score for playing your class, so you can keep track of how well you're doing that.