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There is no need to double down on making player characters make bad decisions. The bad decisions the player makes are frequent and bad enough no additional mechanic is required. But I wonder if the same poster that think we need to force PCs to make bad decisions also thinks that every time...

Just as a bit of a vent out of frustration, but you'd think that after 260 hours of pretending to be bounty hunters that the players would begin to be a bit better bounty hunters and conduct a wee more skillful investigation or at least be able to discretely pinch someone out of a bar without...

Flubbed investigation; accidentally warned terrorist

Either way.

I think that it's obvious that a role-playing game as it has been played and continues to have been played is some part game, some part simulation, and some part story - and probably several other things besides. "RPG" covers a lot of territory, so that we could say "Nethack" is an RPG and...

I realize that there are GMs that are highly inconsistent in this, but in my case I try to be highly consistent. If the player has the knowledge that trolls are vulnerable to fire, then the character has that knowledge as well if the player decides for themself that they do. I never try to...

I think you are right but I think that we don't have to deal in binaries here. One of my design realizations over the years is that everything that can be a quantity should be a quantity. So for example, fire elementals in my game don't have immunity to fire, they have fire resistance of 50...

I noticed this post by accident looking for something else, and I think it's a great example of how you never know what the future will hold. September 2008 was indeed a depressing month of my life. But within two years of this post I found a gaming group that I have now played with for 15...

That's a very good summary and I agree that WotC's rollout of 4e could be taught in a business class as an example of how to do everything wrong about the rollout of a new product alongside something like 'New Coke'. But, you don't even mention what I would put as the major thing that turned me...

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One of the reasons you got lucky is that by the time of 2e TSR had decided to adopt the Comic Book Code in all their publications. If TSR had done that in the first place, there never would have been a big problem. But early TSR art was both soft pornographic at times and occult. TSR removed...

I'm all for cinematic narration and emersion, but I find that has very little to do with degree of success vs. pass fail and a lot to do with whether the system has touch points that players can engage with situationally to accomplish goals, or conversely which encourages the GM to mess with the...

My parents and I had a spirited disagreement about it for about 2 or 3 hours. I think this is the first time I can remember defying my parents. They asked my opinion as was usual, they didn't like it this time and it was about me this time, and they set to trying to convince me I was wrong. I...

I find that not everything lends itself to binary pass/fail and not everything lends itself to having degrees of success. Sometimes you are testing true/false and sometimes you are testing a range of potential outcomes. Shoe horning everything into one or the other for me tends to be a...

The hardest part of GMing is that the (typical) player simultaneously wants to struggle but not to fail. The heroic narrative in other media that are static and non-participatory have this arc where the character faces seemingly impossible odds and, no matter who they are, even if they are...

Blasphemy in the first paragraph of an article about 4e seem par for the course in the edition's tone deafness and the way it marketed itself.

I don't think it has to, but I do think it depends on the system. And I do also think that most games are poorly designed to handle tests of philosophy, belief, and integrity. In D&D, we'd not so much be testing the character, than testing how many resources the GM was willing to give to the...

Agreed, but note that in this case the transcript of play creates a believable story. The audience goes, "Why did the PC fall madly in love with this NPC? Oh, because a love potion coerced them!" We're not asked to believe that the PC loves the NPC for an out of game out of narrative reason...

Agreed, but the GM also "fudged out". It's the GM's responsibility to tell a good story and make events that happen within it believable. If it's not remotely believable for the PC to fall for the NPC just because the GM rolled or otherwise compelled that result, why should the play not play...

Mouseguard has amazing presentation and terrible rules. The original Vampire: The Masquerade is another example; incredible presentation, horrible rules. GURPS is always very readable and feels logical but plays horribly and it quickly become apparent that feeling logical isn't the same as...