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It 100% comes across as extremely flippant about player investment and preferences, yes, and treating the player's enjoyment of the game as secondary to the austere purity of the feeling of "verisimilitude". (Because, as I've personally brought up in this very thread, there are commonly-held...

But I thought "ask the DM every time" was the correct and intended thing for D&D 5e? Like that was literally all people could talk about back when 5e launched. Every single thread asking for advice, without fail, had one of the first 10 (sometimes the first five) responses be some variation of...

No. The point was, if it is on the table in the first place, it must have been possible to begin with. If it wasn't possible to begin with, it never should have been on the table in the first place. These two things are logically equivalent, as they are contrapositives of one another. ("If A...

So verisimilitude is more important than players enjoying the characters they wish to enjoy.

Short-and-sweet name for a useful thing to do when figuring out what a group wants from a game (e.g., something to deploy during Session Zero). "Lines" are things that, if crossed, would break the experience. "Veils" are things that are okay to occur, but not much "on camera", so to...

I'd say the signal to noise ratio isn't great, but when you do get signal, it's something good. Panning for gold, one might say; a single nugget is worth many hours of sand.

Fully agreed. There definitely sounds like some desire to have one's cake and eat it too, here, from those waving the "player agency" flag now. (Funny how little player agency mattered previously, eh?) The player gets to decide every time, all the time, what their character would or wouldn't...

I know of no system where "fail forward" is codified and could ever be used to introduce a complication that doesn't make sense. Such systems begin from their very foundation by saying that you should do things like, as PbtA games put it, "begin and end with the fiction", for example. If...

I wasn't the one who called it railroading. Others did, and you granted it. You had agreed with pemerton that it was being used to keep the story, in his words, "keeping things 'on the rails'"; to which your reply was: Were you disputing that this was railroading, and simply did not choose to...

I mean I can tell you but it's so specific I don't think it will be helpful. I was running may adaptation of the very excellent The Gardens of Ynn supplement, keeping most of the setting mechanics but adapting it to Dungeon World rules and the needs of my game (which is in the style of the...

Well. All I can say is, I have an extremely low opinion of whatever "principles" undergird railroading. But I will emphasize that "railroading", as I use the term, isn't a good thing. It's inherently manipulative, though not necessarily deceptive. People who knowingly and openly want a linear...

I don't understand how FF could ever...not be kept in the GM's control. It's purely expressed in how GMs frame scenes where someone failed to achieve something they wanted to achieve. How could that ever be anything else...? I'm truly confused here.

... So, let me get this straight. You want me to give you demonstrations of Fail Forward...in the contexts where that technique appears... But you demand that it ONLY be examples from campaigns specifically using D&D? Are you serious?

....no? Like, literally, no, in no way whatsoever? I'm literally saying that the example given won't be meaningful or useful to Lanefan because, as far as I can tell, he doesn't play 5e and couldn't care less whether it does or doesn't do any particular thing. Hence, if one is trying to make an...

From whom? Because I've felt on many occasions that people are straight-up telling me that the rules I use are inherently anti-rational. Or taking actively, knowingly, intentionally uncharitable interpretations in order to paint something else as obviously stupid and wrong and bad. Smells...

This is a huge part of why I am such a cautious player myself, and why I have put in a great deal of effort into making sure my players know that they won't have their ability to participate in the game, nor the character-story they're interested in exploring, ripped away merely because of a...

Yeah...I feel that. Apparently, my players really are genuinely happy about most of the stuff that goes on in the game, but getting any feedback more specific than "great session!" or, when prompted, "I liked X" and/or "I can't think of any problems" is like pulling teeth. I guess a lot of...

Unfortunately, no clerics have been getting their spells for a while, so there's nobody around to cast true resurrection right now.

Seems to me pretty dang clear that most of the comments in this (six-month-old) thread are about seeing a direct connection between D&D slot machines and trying to fleece money out of children.

I would be extremely surprised if Lanefan has a positive reaction to knowing this, as IIRC he does not play 5e and has a skeptical view of many things it does. Might be better to give examples from one of the TSR editions.