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  1. prabe

    What are you reading in 2024?

    I read a book every night I'm not ... doing something else (gaming, vacation, some other social thing ...). My wife reads more ... constantly than I do, and not all that much slower (and she just figured out that she can knit and read at the same time, more slowly at both, so long as the...
  2. prabe

    What are you reading in 2024?

    Or, uh, get ready to bounce off of the meta ... :LOL:
  3. prabe

    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    What matters is that the people at the table are able to anticipate how the world will behave. At some tables, in some games, that will be mostly genre logic; that's not necessarily universal (though I think I agree it's more common than a lot of people realize).
  4. prabe

    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    I don't think we're disagreeing much, just maybe talking from different angles? The game world needs to be comprehensible and consistent so the people at the TRPG table can make reasonable decisions based on their understanding of it, I think we agree on that? So for example, if at one table...
  5. prabe

    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    I was getting more at the idea that whoever's establishing fictional things needs to consider how what they're establishing changes the past (or how it looks). This pretty obviously more likely to be a problem for permanent things than for transient ones.
  6. prabe

    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    I think that we at the table care about the game world conforming to reality mainly so as to make it comprehensible to the people at the table. I think that what that means will probably vary table-to-table, both as a matter of knowledge and as a matter of ability to willingly suspend disbelief...
  7. prabe

    What are you reading in 2024?

    I did. It's not as much reading as I used to do (I'm sure there's at least one year in the 1990s when I read at least 500 books) but given that I more or less wasn't reading for pleasure at all, a little more than a year ago, I'm happy to be reading as much as I am. Eventually I'll start doing...
  8. prabe

    What are you reading in 2024?

    It's been a good year of reading for me. Somewhere over 180 books, like three DNFs. Mostly novels. Some really very good books, some really very not good ones even outside the DNFs. Found some writers to watch and some writers to avoid.
  9. prabe

    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    The metaphysics (so to speak) of my primary setting world seem as though even deific ranks would be a poor fit. I think the "plausible threat of death" just needs things that can plausibly kill the PCs to try to kill the PCs. It helps to have players who play their characters like people who've...
  10. prabe

    D&D General Playstyle vs Mechanics

    The only hiccup in the approach you outline is that the audience for a piece of pre-authored fiction probably needs to know if something isn't going to follow real-world physics--not even classical mechanics--before it turns out not to, especially if that ends up being to the protagonist's...
  11. prabe

    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    I don't have deities in my setting, for reasons. I drop PCs all the time, all the way through Tier Four, and I've killed at least one PC at high levels (she got better ...) without invoking that sort of thing to keep the PCs "in line." There were jokes throughout the one campaign about the PCs...
  12. prabe

    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    So if you had actually read my actual post, you would plausibly have figured out I mostly agree with you, that the players of a TRPG should have those sorts of expectations. That said, there are all sorts of good reasons one might use gamelike rules even if you have those--I'm sure you're clever...
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    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    I don't see what you saw in my post/s that indicated the players wouldn't contribute. No one has any stories pre-written, the story of the game emerges from playing the game.
  14. prabe

    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    Story--including expectations like plot armor--is best as an output, not an input.
  15. prabe

    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    Well, the first word of my post was "If," and I did at least imply that the medium should affect one's expectations. I'll say that explicitly: The medium (novel, movie, TRPG, whatever) should matter tor your expectations of it.
  16. prabe

    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    If the players see their characters as protagonists in a story, why wouldn't they expect their characters to have at least as much protection fro actual death (plot armor) as protagonists in a novel or movie or TV show? If you want to argue the players shouldn't see their characters thus, I'm...
  17. prabe

    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    I think this might be the first time I've seen anyone non-sarcastically say that Drizzt and Elminster were positive features of the Realms. :LOL: In the 5e games I DM, I've had good success with entities that think of adventurers as something like investments, because there are all sort of...
  18. prabe

    Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

    Y'know, there times I seriously don't know why y'all bother with us.
  19. prabe

    Pineapple Express: Someone Is Wrong on the Internet?

    I expect you'd see people in this thread complaining obliquely about something that might eventually start to look like that sort of brigading. I stay out of the threads that's most likely to happen in, here, for game-preference reasons, but I haven't seen any reason to think it's happening.
  20. prabe

    D&D General How Often Should a PC Die in D&D 5e?

    In the 5e campaigns I've DMed, how the PCs have been and are treated is mostly a direct result of their behavior--in most cases, there's a certain amount of rushing in where those with wiser heads would fear to tread--and in the most recent one they were established locals with pasts and...
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