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You know, I think part of my issue might simply be the number of characters. I do a lot better with slice of life when the perspective is constrained to a limited few, and they aren't dealing with distant or unrelated events. It's certainly not that I mind system exploration or even setting...

I'll reconsider it! I'd pushed it off the list for the portal fantasy reasons listed above.

I immediately love this conceptually. Differentiated spellcasting is my favorite underused space in D&D, I would absolutely love all the classes to be working with different resource systems and different mechanical undercarriages. I have mixed feelings on this, but I struggle with a spot for...

I really wanted to like the Wandering Inn more, but it's a bit too meandering for me. It does that thing where the characters feel like they're just stirred around together to see what comes out, when I really need a bit more plot.

Amusingly, I have precisely the opposite problem. I'll take rules for days, but I despise a portal frame narrative. Either the whole experience becomes more artificial, feels like a lazy exposition device, or it feels like it's wasting my time until the character finally becomes sufficiently...

Left to my druthers, I would go a step further and say "you can't have a game" at all, but that's unnecessarily hostile in this space, and you could find people even in board games who would disagree. I just think that's a facile and limited way to look at RPGs specifically; I've argued before...

I'm leery of talk of puzzles and solutions when it comes to describing gameplay, but that's broadly right. I'm now just reflexively braced for "and that works for dungeon crawling but not for...." that always comes next.

See, this is a great summation of the ongoing fight about language. That's a narrativist summation of what's happening; I'd propose the GM is an attempt to generate and report on a fictional setting that players can interact with via mechanical mediation. The GM is an imperfect technology for...

Right, I don't really think that's a bad thing, so much as the earseeker was a stupid escalation that led to weird results. Fundamentally, I want players to come up with procedures to resolve problems as safely as possible. My ideal state as a GM is reluctantly acknowledging the player has...

I think mine fall somewhere between James Bond films and heist stories. A big problem presented upfront to a recurring cast of characters that occasionally cycle in and out, who then build a plan applying their expertise to solve it, either returning to the status quo, or discovering a bigger...

I'm not sure how to read any of that as an argument in favor of a fail forward model. Either you're introducing yet more points of failure if those perceptions rolls are subject to the same risks, or you're proposing a play pattern where the correct approach is to first anticipate all fiction...

Hold up, you're conflating two different things here. Novel stuff, like encounters, creatures, situations, traps, all that, is not the same as an unknown result to an action declaration. I'm all about all about knowledge checks, perception all that (and have argued before they should generally...

It seems to me that there's at least 2 lines of argument against a fail forward model, which I'm categorizing as "the argument from naturalism" and "the argument from gameplay." I'm frankly less attached to the argument from naturalism, at best I think it can serve to make the game state more...

One dreads the conversation turning toward "immersion" or "realism" but I've argued before that forward facing causality of action declaration->resolution is an underlying prerequisite off players looking for that experience.

I suppose a mechanical consideration of this that does deserve more attention is that not having fail forward style contingent fiction works best when you have competent and powerful PCs with high agency abilities. If the only play the PC's have is a roll to unlock a door and a roll to break it...

I don't think this is quite right; the question at stake isn't the actual play or recitation of those situations in full. It's perfectly possible and one imagines quite common that you get "alright, you buy 6 days of rations and a waterskin, there aren't any arcane focuses for sale in this town"...

That's just causality all over again though. The situation, ideally, should be interesting enough that there doesn't need to be fiction contingent on the roll to pick the lock, so much as picking a lock being an emergent thing that occurs in an already interesting state. I think the focus on...

That is actually an interesting line for playtesting. I wonder if you couldn't break those triggers up over several rolls and move the ones closest to complications back into the GM's hands, and if that wouldn't have a significant effect on player sentiment. Well, I suppose that's essentially...

For sure. I'm saying here that a player who's looking to find the correct sequence of 3 decisions that gets them out scott free isn't going to be bothered if they get it wrong on decision 2 and get caught, but they are going to be very upset if the resolution process doesn't fundamentally allow...

There's a framing problem here though; it's not a question of "scenes" at all to the player enjoying the exploration element here. If the goal is a sense of a consistent, fictional setting, then null results or low tension moments provide validation that high tension situations are as "real."...