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With rare exceptions, pretty much hard 'no' for me. The PCs are part of the setting just like anyone else, it's what they do that makes them special rather than who they are.

It works fine for me. :) Just as in the Game of Thrones books, you run it in chapters - play one party for a while, then put them on hold and play another party for a while, lather-rinse-repeat until-unless some of those parties meet, interweave, combine or split up again, etc. etc. And during...

Further to a discussion several hundred posts upthread about DMs revealing hidden information when it doesn't matter any more, this just happened in tonight's session: The party had to get to a gem that was, twice a round, emitting a variable number of different-colour flashes toward different...

Part of the issue is that there's no way of knowing which lowlights now will affect which highlights later until (sometimes quite a while) after the fact. For example, the sequence might go 6, 8, 4, 18, 9, 5, 14, 2, 4, 4, 10. Or it might go 6, 8, 4, 14, 9, 5, 13, 2, 4, 4, 11; the '14' is only...

The GM could just say that but IMO it would all depend on just what's going on up there. If the friend is in combat then probably best to play out that combat round-by-round while the PC is trying to climb the cliff. Hell, maybe by the time you get up there your friend doesn't need saving any...

There is a fix to this, though 5e-by-RAW types sure wouldn't like it. If A's initiative is 15 and her declared action is to move, then attack, then duck for cover the fix is to roll to see how many initiative 'pips' each of those sub-actions takes. For example, it's set by her original...

Game of Thrones.

We do individual initiative on d6 without speed factor, rerolled each round, but each attack or shot gets its own initiative that can't be the same (i.e. if one of your attacks is on a '3' then none of your your other attack(s) that round can be on '3').

This is one of those oh-so-very-rare instances where I find myself agreeing with @pemerton. The way WotC-era initiative works is very much a stop-motion kind of thing; to the point where characters' movements in combat are much like mini-teleports rather than second-by-second motion. Also...

Indeed. Interesting, and also very sad: the rules are actively encouraging the players to metagame.

Turn-based combat without allowance for tied initiatives is the problem here. Our initiative system allows for simultaneous actions and it works well enough. A could kill B at the same time B kills A, which is impossible with WotC-style turn-based combat.

They don't have to like it. They just have to accept it as a possible consequence of failing in their attempt.

The important thing in the scene might be saving your friend but there's a major obstacle en route to arriving at said scene, namely the cliff you have to climb. Get past the cliff first, then we'll resolve what becomes of your friend. Those are all valid as lesser successes. None of them are...

In some ways yes, in other ways no. We did adopt the 3e idea that rules apply the same to PCs and NPCs alike, only long before 3e arrived and in fact well before 2e did. We kept that some species couldn't be some classes at all, but if you could be a class your species didn't stop you...

Except when nothing is in fact something. "Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom."

The moment you narrate they've arrived safely at their destination you've also just established that nothing of any significant danger occurred during that journey, meaning that any retconning they want to do is now under the umbrella of that safety you already established. This becomes...

This completely fails (sorry) to address my concerns about failure being turned into success. Remember, the task at hand that's being rolled for is to climb the cliff. That's it. Any concerns about anything at the top of the cliff have to wait to see if you even get there. The bolded...

They go all over the place; I was merely trying to posit an example of a situation where "nothing happens" is the most plausible result. Boring perhaps, but by no means a jerk move. Depending on the fiction already established, inflicting oen of these on the PCs' attempts might be much more -...

The raising of specific objections is the "enumerate why" piece, and it's the raising of those objections that tends to run smack into the unfavourable judgment of others.

Temporal linearity in play is important to me. And because of this I'm running aground all over the place right now in the game I'm running: most of the current party recently (in real-world time) got divinely blipped a year and a half backward in game-world time and are now having to take all...