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Yeah, that's why you get both concern that players can't meaningfully do that, and/or also concerns that they have too much negotiating power from people who've internalized that as a norm. It's a massive commonplace to shift.

Less common, but the inverse is also a thing you see sometimes, and more commonly in actual play than elsewhere. I'm thinking about the falling from a window scene in Dimension 20's Mice & Murder, which amounted to Brennan Lee Mulligan asking for roll after roll until one succeeded and he could...

Right, I'm saying this doesn't need to be in the GM's hands at all. You could write a sufficiently detailed stealth system before play, then have the GM simply apply it to any given situation. Those decisions about difficulty and repeated rolls could be made by someone else ahead of time, thus...

Why is this necessarily a GM facing problem? You could space this at the system level with a more socially designed stealth system, tested in scenarios that match the intended level of competence. Off the top of my head, reworking Stealth as a fixed value that's spent down to perform actions...

I have mixed feelings. Some of this is a basis for design and perfectly useful, some of it feels like it's written in response to narrativist critique, and some of it has nothing to do with any sort of design or even play advice. Point 1 is useful, but has too many assumptions. Why should there...

I mean, that's kind of obviously the most unlikely way to approach a design that way; no one is commissioning art in hopes it inspires them to a game design epiphany. All of my examples included either an extensive IP, or an artist with a pretty big body of work and a consistent tone/subject...

Right, but all we have are hyperlink structures. We should also just rearrange the scrolling order of the pages with some filter to create different reading experiences.

This reminds me of something I've always wanted in a digital book that's intended for reference. It should be possible to have multiple organization schemes you can flip between. There's obviously a use case for putting them by type, alphabetically, by CR and even something like by environment...

I haven't looked at 5e assumptions, but aren't force effects supposed to exist on both planes and affect them both?

Oh for sure, Dimension 20 is excellent, I'm always excited to give up a Wednesday evening. I just don't think he's at his best in the liveshow situation, especially having seen all the Time Quangle and the Madison Square Garden VODs. They get very parasocical and slimmed down, while still trying...

I don't think this specific point quite holds. There's quite a few art-first success stories in board games, including some pretty heavy hitters. Scythe and Beast were both very successful and designed specifically to use existing artwork, and the company Off The Page Games takes as their entire...

Yeah, I agree. He's way better with more time to breathe. Worlds Beyond Number is definitely his best work, and it's no surprise it's his longest term project.

Controversial, but I think Mulligan is only okay live. You can see him ripping rules off the system in real time, and it suffers for it.

Perhaps some reframing of what part of the game loop is actually being engaged is relevant here. Players basically do two things: ask the GM for more information about the situation and declare actions that take them to a new situation. Should some of these failures be viewed more as part of the...

Combat is actually an interesting counter point, precisely because it's always a timer. Assuming a standard battle without extra win conditions, you're trying to get the opponent's HP down before some threshold before the party's. Assuming some standardized DPR and that PCs can't do anything fun...

I'm mostly hoping this means a lot more content comes out to support Daggerheart. I didn't immediately love it, but there's nothing there another 6 sourcebooks couldn't fix. Hopefully this land we see a mainstream popular RPG with a steady content release schedule.

I just don't see it. You could maybe make a case for less daily resources? Late 3e was mostly marked by experimentation with resource systems altogether though, casting that as an obvious precursor to a unified progression model feels wild.

I was absolutely paying attention to those changes, and I don't at all agree. An alternative development path that worked to address 3e's problems without giving up on PC/NPC transparency seemed totally viable, even at the time. My relative youth might have been a factor (I technically played...

It's the latter that's really proven tricky, which is the whole thing in this thread right? People overindex on the play loop of whatever table they're at and then treat it as a norm of the TTRPG form.

The very idea that a DC lives outside the DM has been alien to the 5e first players I've discussed it with. Even when presented with skill mechanics, they still treat the base gameplay loop as negotiation, and treat the mechanics as a DM facing tool to help me set DCs.