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  1. Lanefan

    Chaosium Names New CEO, Mike Mearls Departs Company

    The cool thing for me personally is that Neil played in my game some decades ago (he's responsible for the best-worst character name ever: Sir Kalvin of Hobbes); he once introduced me as his first DM, but technically I was his second.
  2. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    More commonly IME - particularly at very low levels - they need to turn around and go back to get new characters to replace what they lost; getting new supplies is done at the same time, helped (sometimes greatly!) by any treasure they've thus far managed to scoop from the place. But I have...
  3. Lanefan

    D&D 5E (2024) It Is 2025 And Save Or Suck Spells Still Suck (the fun out of the game)

    It's not an arms race, it's merely remembering and then ensuring that the rules apply to PCs and NPCs alike. Or put another way, it's a question of ensuring the NPCs sometimes actually use the arms they already have.
  4. Lanefan

    D&D 5E (2024) It Is 2025 And Save Or Suck Spells Still Suck (the fun out of the game)

    I'd also accept the first one but not the second, as one of the provisos I put on Suggestion is that the suggested action has to have a definable point of completion. "Hike to the nearest village and tell them we're under attack" is perfect; once those things have been done the suggested action...
  5. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    5e took out Warp Wood? Druid spell? And indeed, it's possible they don't have the correct resources. Again, so be it - go back and get 'em. The whole point of an obstacle is to slow or prevent progress. Unlike modern game design, I don't want to ignore or toss out the "or prevent" piece; I...
  6. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    Question: how does having a single (potential) point of failure have any relation to direct storytelling?
  7. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    I'm a "crueller despot" than that; if they all fall into a pit trap they can't get out of then they roll up new characters. That said, it'd have to be a very odd/unusual situation to a) have them all fall in to the same trap and b) not have any way of getting at least one character out. And...
  8. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    Sure, not all of these are going to work every time, but the options are still there to try. IME most mages try to get their mitts on Knock as soon as they can, also in my game it doesn't have the alarm-bell feature that 5e gave it. And if the door opens toward you, the hinges have to be on...
  9. Lanefan

    D&D 5E (2024) It Is 2025 And Save Or Suck Spells Still Suck (the fun out of the game)

    Yes. What's good for the goose... If you're playing your NPCs true to character this simply should not be an issue, and ideally the players have been well warned about this ahead of time.
  10. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    It also depends on how important the characters' gear and equipment are to play. In a game where gear and equipment are carefully tracked and-or can be vital to success, forgetting to pick up something while in town can have big consequences later and thus at least doing the basic "adding items...
  11. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    Can the door not be opened any other way than by picking the lock? Forcefully-applied boots? Repeated use of an axe or hammer? Removal of hinges? Knock spell? Shrink spell? Warp Wood spell (if the door has any wood to it)? Someone goes gaseous or shapeshifts into something really small or...
  12. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    To a point, after which enough detail gets lost or skipped that continuity starts to suffer. Given it's supposedly the GM's job to frame scenes, my assumption would appear valid. Nope. The scenes could be framed in the moment as they arise, but the end result is the same: the GM drives the...
  13. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    My take on that is if it's going to implode, let it. Just make sure the brawling stays in character. :) The party I'm running right now has three Thieves in it - two pure and one multi-classed with Illusionist - out of seven characters total. All of them have some ve-ery shady things in their...
  14. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    I tell them to do what their characters would do. If someone roleplays their way out of the party then, depending on the player's intentions, one of - or a combination of - several things might happen: --- the departed character retires and the player rolls up a new one (or cycles a...
  15. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    Which then sounds like it's the GM determining the path of my character's revenge story via the scenes she frames me into, rather than me-as-player trying to determine that path via the actions I have the character take in the fiction....which is fair enough, but let's call it what it is.
  16. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    Thing is, oftentimes some or even all of those 'x' events are what lead up to the following 'H' event; which means eliding or handwaving the 'x' events risks having those 'H' events happen in isolation and without coherent in-fiction explanation - kinda like a movie where the editor was ordered...
  17. Lanefan

    Pace in your game.

    That sounds about right. Agonizing over trivialites and spinning out simple tasks are commonplace round here. Reaching consensus is a different issue, and often doesn't come about because of the next paragraph. The best solution IMO and IME is to play a Chaotic character with a fairly low...
  18. Lanefan

    Do You Care About Cosmology?

    Whether or not I-as-player ever read any of it, I still want it to be there as a foundation that makes the setting tick and that informs the GM when designing the rest of the setting. It might also even have rules-system implications; either by narrowing the choices of which system to use or...
  19. Lanefan

    D&D General Satanic Panic at the Disco- Did Beelzebubba Cause D&D's First Crash, Y'all?

    D&D was a victim of the Satanic panic but, as the OP notes, the main effects came in the later 1980s. There's some other factors at play as well that both helped the fad and killed it. The late 1960s and early 70s saw a pretty big Tolkein craze in some quarters; the timing of the emergence...
  20. Lanefan

    D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

    I actually think an all-highlights game could still be verisimilitudinous, as that's a feature of the underlying setting and approach more than the degree of in-fiction detail that setting and approach is used for in play. A higher-detail type of play just makes the verisimilitude easier to see.
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