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Sometimes they don't. Many times, they're (or I'm!) thinking as creatively as possible, and applying something outside of the explicit, narrow definitions that the ability allows. My Dark Sun sorcerer, for example, using Burning Spray to set an oily oasis-mimic on fire rather than getting...

So you think that that manifesto is your platonic ideal of gaming...but you directly and specifically reject prioritizing the players first? Bit of a swerve, there. Not sure I can make sense of it.

Wait, so now players signing up for something is an absolute must-assume, it has to be true, and a player that then reevaluates is being a problem, such that we can and should question why they would do that... But a GM running a system is completely the opposite??? For goodness' sake, this is...

"Fail without retry" is orthogonal to "Fail Forward". The two can appear together, each separately, or both absent. Loose pure-hypothetical back-of-the envelope examples. FWR+FF: Rolling an Arcana check to determine the destination of a teleportation portal before it closes. Can't really try...

My experience is entirely the opposite. "Asking can I do X" happens all the time in combat. Nice strawman there. I never said that. But go off, friendo. I have little desire to discuss it further when you levy accusations and then do the exact thing you just accused me of.

They never ask if X thing would work? They never experiment? That's frankly shocking. If that isn't needed in the former, why would it be needed here? .... You have a very strange idea of what counts as "smooth" vs "clunky". I find social encounters never, and I genuinely mean never, are...

Oooh boy. Gonna have to completely reject that penultimate sentence of this bit. Death is not a structural necessity. There are plenty of games, including some versions of D&D, that do not have character death. Consider Dragonlance stuff. Very much D&D--but the modules explicitly had rules...

The point was that your personal perspective on it has nothing to do with whether it is, in fact, absolutely that thing and no other things. Partial success is distinct from both unmitigated success and unmitigated failure. It is, by its nature, a mixed thing. You are within your rights to say...

Generally? Probably about what you said in the bit I cut out--about two or three sessions at most. If the game takes more than four multi-hour sessions to play, it's at least more like a TTRPG than it is like the vast, vast majority of board games. Why not? Length of game means length of...

I believe so, yes. And it was just as tedious as one might expect.

I did not "start complaining" when the fireproof box was brought up. That was brought up as a dismissal of my criticism. Beyond that, I have nothing further to say to this, because you're straight-up divorcing the conversation from the context in which it occurred in order to--as I have been...

But it isn't a large disruption in combat...? Where rolls are much more frequent and often occur rapid-fire? C'mon Max. This is blatant special pleading.

I didn't say they don't. You had responded to something talking about not casually destroying the things that make a player care about their character, by straight-up saying nope, doesn't matter, I can and will destroy the stuff that makes you care about playing your character. Whether or not...

House-ruling a board game (other than Monopoly, which is chronically house-ruled in unproductive ways) is pretty rare. Further, a board game is--perhaps--a few hours' entertainment or lack thereof. It's trivial to not play it again with that person. If you're the GM of a D&D game, you're...

Is it "not supposed to happen" in D&D? That implies there are things that are and aren't "supposed to happen" in D&D. Where do you derive this certainty from? I presume it would need to be something even more inarguable than the rules, since I know your stance is that the GM is the absolute...

Well, House MD isn't Sherlock. By being a different character, even if he is inspired by the (crappy) interpretations of Sherlock Holmes, it's quite a bit easier to swallow that he would behave as he does. House is a semi-pro cynic with various emotional traumas and severe physical pain pretty...

I'm saying it needs to be one or the other--and the character needs to remain consistent from one instance to the next. If player A can declare that their character simply cannot be convinced to drink, then the players cannot get mad that there are things NPCs simply cannot be persuaded to do...

I can't say I'm surprised that you would cavalierly destroy the things that make your players enjoy your game in order to uphold perfect fidelity to the feeling of verisimilitude. Player enjoyment of the experience is not the most important goal.

I mean I feel like this is a pretty straightforward yes/no question. If you had to choose between ruining a player's experience, destroying the thing that makes them enjoy playing their character, but preserving perfect fidelity to the feeling of verisimilitude, vs making a small (I emphasize...

Because I would be able to give actual, concrete examples I have personally played or run, rather than pure hypotheticals. I don't understand this answer either. How is that not still under the GM's purview? Again, I just want to reiterate: You would rather trash the things a player loves...