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Change is one thing. But I sure wouldn’t mind if the change was managed incrementally like with some of my favorite Chaosium games like Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon. I’m quite OK with 5e.2024 being an incremental step from 5e.2014, just like I was for 2e being a step from 1e. Bring me along...

What did you say?

When listening to personal-sounding or other POV lyrics for a song, you always wonder just how much of it (if any) is autobiographical. Today, I learned that Midnight Oil's song "In the Valley" off the Earth and Sun and Moon album has some autobiographical elements. When lead singer Peter...

I put down 3e on the assumption that someone might want to use alignment. I think 3e did it best because it has the best options for making alignment matter in a practical sense. There are spells and magic items devoted to making alignment matter. But I'm also OK with 5e's nearly complete...

There's no game rule structured requirement for anything to happen... but did your knight and the noble just awkwardly look at each other with the failure to kick out his chair? Or did something happen?

Is there a particular reason this absolutely could not be a move in a PBtA game? There wouldn't be moves to goad, provoke, or otherwise wrongfoot an NPC that the PC could attempt but then fail in any PBtA game? Because it seems to me that your PC attempted to embarrass(?) or otherwise knock down...

:unsure: So... why is a knight rolling to... checks notes... "kick a chair"?

I definitely agree. A table's success at splitting the party into different locations and taking care of different tasks is going to depend a lot on the players at the table and their patience with other players and GM. Drawn out interactions with complex mechanical systems in the game like...

And even if they do, it has to make sense with their business plan - which wouldn't be a given with all the talk of mergers and challenges at achieving profitability. I think the number of subscribers a crowd-funded documentary would bring in is fairly small.

To my mind, this is the single, thorniest issue you’ve raised. How to keep people engaged, whether the Heavy or not, when another player has the spotlight when the party is split up. And a major part of the solution, pretty much whatever the system, is the GM keeping focus moving around the...

To win at chess, depending on your approach, you may have the goal to control the center of the board, to threaten your opponent’s queen, or any number of other intermediate goals in checkmating your opponent’s king. If the challenge might be there to put up the possibility of a new goal… isn’t...

But in order to win, the final goal of the game, you need to have intermediate goals of scoring - including scoring touchdowns. And the goal of winning the game is likely just an intermediate goal to making it to the play-offs or having a winning season. Goals at all sorts of levels. If the...

Depends on the goals you're looking at. Failing to sneak past the guard is a fail state for the goal of infiltrating undetected. It's probably not a fail state for getting into he dungeon to kill the BBEG, though it may complicate that goal. It's probably not a fail state for the goal of...

There are going to be a variety of levels of goals, some immediate, some longer term and there should be challenges, some immediate, some cumulative, that should be capable of foiling those goals and leading to a fail state. Exactly how they do so is going to be complex, and what exactly...

But are those "engaging and fair challenges" capable of actually foiling the goal? Of causing PCs to fail at achieving them? Should they not be capable of doing so?

Well, what do you think an appropriate goal for a GM is if the player's goal is success? Are they not supposed to set up challenges capable of foiling that goal?

I think that is an extremely uncharitable interpretation of what Mearls said. I mean, this really is into the "When did you stop beating your wife" kind of territory in which it looks like there's no way for him to get an even break from you. Really, what's the source of your utter mad-on...

This is why it’s important for the adults involved to give it some kind of meaning for the kids. If you’re not keeping score, chances are some kids in the team are and are actually noticing whether they’re winning or losing. So, you redirect them into ascribing some other meaning than winning...

I’ve seen this happen before, and when I experienced it, it was largely because there were differences in how active managers were in pushing forward the recognition compared to other managers. For example, when I was a software QAer, I worked at a place where marketing and sales got a LOT more...

Well, that’s part of the difference between running a published scenario or AP vs designing adventures/situations based on the PCs. Not all adventures are suitable for all PCs under the sun so a bit of tailoring, whether of the published scenario or PCs (or both) will be in order. If you want to...