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I know people dislike this conclusion, but how much you dislike it doesn't change the truth of it. I never said that it wasn't. I don't think you actually understand the argument. If a player is allowed to make their choices or left to make their own choices based on their own store of...

Of course they do. And, they have little or no volition in their actions, because they are following a script and doing the actions that someone has written for those characters. This is exactly what my statements would predict.

I not talking about the loss of completely free choice. I'm talking about the loss of all choice. The only way to let a player of any mental or social skill or trait play a character of any mental or social skill or trait is take all volition and agency from the player. This is an absolute truth.

It doesn't matter whether you use free roleplay or any other methodology, you can't keep an RPG a game without also having the problem that certain subsets of players aren't able to play certain characters who are heavily defined by their mental or social attributes. Let's imagine the easy case...

No, because they literally can't replace those skills. An NPC telling a funny joke and declaring that an NPC has told a funny joke and is amusing because they made a difficult charisma check are always two different non-equivalent experiences.

If you can't act to some extent, you'll never be as good of a GM as a person who can. If you don't have the spatial skills to make interesting maps, you'll never be as good of a GM as a person who can. If you don't have the tactical skills to play monsters and NPCs to the best of their...

You've run into the many problems associated with imagining that all skills are equal and roleplaying is meaningless. The truth is, to really run a deceptive NPC adversary you have to be able to roleplay and cunningly deceive the players and not merely the characters. "Pretend you are deceived...

GURP War against the Chtorr

I've done both. Episodic has a huge hidden advantage of allowing more room for PC's to pursue their own stories, but not every group is really interested in that and linear stories do have nicely big stakes and can build up to very dramatic scenes.

Another thing to think about is making sure that if you are going to have a low magic setting you don't have a lot of easy access game breaking magic. So, for example, "Fly" gets bumped up to a 4th level spell in my game. Most other flying related magic is also likewise a level higher...

I can only tell you what I do which is play 3e D&D like it was 1e AD&D. a) Magic shops basically don't exist. Weak magic items that could be produced by 6th level or lower spellcaster are available once you achieve a friendly relationship with a spellcaster and commission the work. Potions...

I mean, this is a general problem with 1e period, especially once you add in things like specialization. Almost everything in 1e AD&D is a glass canon, and most combats are basically over by the initiative roll. Almost none of the original monsters are designed to face more than 10th level...

If CoC is the definitive horror game of cosmic horror, then Chill is very much the definitive horror game of things that go bump in the night. It's sort of like Cthulhu Pulp only facing off against Dracula and the Wolfman. And if that doesn't sound scary you are very much underestimating how...

My long-term group has been meeting online since the pandemic started and we are steadily meeting less and less. And we are now at the situation where we actually can't meet in person because people have moved away, but I know that a lot of the reason we are meeting less often comes down to the...

Giants are generally end game foes in my game, similar to how they appear in the original G1-3 series. Giants in my homebrew world are the offspring of dalliances between the gods and genies, with each giant race representing offspring of different elemental genies. They differ from typical...

Well, yes. Could you explain why that's not a reasonable thing? Like, shouldn't a good comedy game be the funniest?

Horror I've decided is hard. Very hard. I enjoy CoC (7e preferred), Chill 2e, and Dread, but none them manage to create the experience I like. I'm also a big fan of Ravenloft from the 1e to 3e era, to the extent that I use rules for fear, horror, and madness in my regular D&D games. It's an...

As a GM you are often much more the center of attention than you are as a player, but that's not the big problem I've had lately with being a player. The big problem I have now being a player is part of my mind is always going, "I could design or run this adventure better than this." I'm...

It depends. I do believe it is a failure of DMing skill but sometimes not correcting that by fudging to keep a PC or PCs alive is still the best move. In general, player deaths should be earned and not unearned and they should be they should be seen by the player as fair. If you discover...

@Edgar Ironpelt : Don't disagree with your assessment, but a ton of that boils down to it was a bad the decision to add spell level to saving throw DC and have half of monster HD add to spell-like effect DC. I think if you just do away with those two double dips that increase saving throw DC...