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My wife hates watching MCU movies because there are invariably multiple 10 minute fist fights in the movie and she gets bored in them. Fight choreography has no interest to her. Combat isn't an interesting spectacle for her.

I will admit to having very little breadth to my RPG experiences. I have only played various types of fantasy - generic fantasy, horror fantasy, and science fantasy. I have very little idea how to run or tell stories in other genres for an RPG and indeed, can't imagine how they would work from...

Because players don't have to improvise content on the fly. If you are a GM you are frequently improvising content on the fly, and there are two standards for doing that - invent what you think is narratively useful at the moment or invent what you think is appropriate for the setting. If you...

@kigmatzomat I think that is a much more functional way to look at the problem. The question isn't really "what's typical in fiction", but what's typical in the campaign that I'm running. Establishing demographics is IMO one of the most important things a DM can do when preparing a campaign...

That was true by 3.5e but in 3.0e there were rules for 0th level characters. It would be fairer to say most adults were assumed to be at least 1st level commoners. Who except in basic life skills and resistance to energy drain was more or less equivalent to a 2nd or 3rd level PC classed...

My point is that your example of what is typical is one of the least typical settings of all time and one of the ones that is most removed from typical fantasy literature in how it is described in its game books. Not so much among experts in Tolkien lore. The author is calling out people for...

Try running a campaign based on your theories and get back to me.

Frodo carries the ring because Gandalf can't, by his own confessionm do so. Gandalf says, "I can't, because I'd fail my saving throw." One could argue that Sam, Pippin, and Merry start out as henchmen, but if you are reading the book rather than watching the movie, it's clear Frodo is the...

See, I disagree with the assumption here. Faerun is nothing like a typical fantasy world. When it was first introduced, my group balked at it intensely because it vastly increased the very thing you are talking about - "How prevalent is super heroic power?" Not only did Faerun about double...

Rebuilding after burning their leads

Tomb of Annihilation has its moments and Curse of Strahd is a respectful homage to the original classic, but I honestly think the most recent classic has to be "The Wild Beyond the Witchlight". It has a few problems but it also has an originality to it that I haven't seen in an adventure since...

This is the sort of broadbrush ahistorical innuendo which I guess passes for historical rigor on modern society, but which is in fact merely disinformation and dishonesty. The reader of your remark is not left with greater understanding of the situation, but less. The context of his remarks...

I'm not even sure that is fair to Burroughs. ERB was from a notable abolitionist family, and if you look at work like the "John Carter" series, one of the most important themes of it is that John always judges Martians according to the content of their character and not their skin color. He's...

My homebrew world takes advantage of the fantasy setting to have all sorts of government types that never existed or couldn't exist in the real world. In terms of social development though, the majority of the world is equivalent to 17th century levels of social development where strong nation...

Then I protest you made a big deal about how different you are from my game when in fact you aren't very different at all. You don't really have a novel process of play, you are just very slightly more ad hoc about things than I am in achieving the result of the player seeing the character as...

Well, that would explain my sense that they belonged somewhere else.

I have no idea what this means. I recognize "discover who the character is in play" is a popular statement, but not what process of play is actually being described. a) Do you mean that most characters in a traditional RPG are beginning their adventures and are relatively inexperienced and as...

Agreed, but in my experience, things are a lot more likely to be fair if the GM spent some time thinking through the details of their choices in advance than they are making things up on the spur of the moment. Time for reflection and theory crafting is a good thing. Experience can substitute...

On the subject of rules lawyering, I don't object to a player raising a rules issue at the table. For one thing, sometimes I'm misremembering or misapplying the rules, and a clarification is welcome. If I have a player at the table with a head for the rules, even though to a large extent at my...

I require players to submit a backstory in D&D explaining who their character is and by extension how they expect to play that character. If the character is an elf but doesn't feel very "elfish" I will not approve the character for play. The expectation in taking a race is that you are...