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I think you are right but I think that we don't have to deal in binaries here. One of my design realizations over the years is that everything that can be a quantity should be a quantity. So for example, fire elementals in my game don't have immunity to fire, they have fire resistance of 50...

I noticed this post by accident looking for something else, and I think it's a great example of how you never know what the future will hold. September 2008 was indeed a depressing month of my life. But within two years of this post I found a gaming group that I have now played with for 15...

That's a very good summary and I agree that WotC's rollout of 4e could be taught in a business class as an example of how to do everything wrong about the rollout of a new product alongside something like 'New Coke'. But, you don't even mention what I would put as the major thing that turned me...

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One of the reasons you got lucky is that by the time of 2e TSR had decided to adopt the Comic Book Code in all their publications. If TSR had done that in the first place, there never would have been a big problem. But early TSR art was both soft pornographic at times and occult. TSR removed...

I'm all for cinematic narration and emersion, but I find that has very little to do with degree of success vs. pass fail and a lot to do with whether the system has touch points that players can engage with situationally to accomplish goals, or conversely which encourages the GM to mess with the...

My parents and I had a spirited disagreement about it for about 2 or 3 hours. I think this is the first time I can remember defying my parents. They asked my opinion as was usual, they didn't like it this time and it was about me this time, and they set to trying to convince me I was wrong. I...

I find that not everything lends itself to binary pass/fail and not everything lends itself to having degrees of success. Sometimes you are testing true/false and sometimes you are testing a range of potential outcomes. Shoe horning everything into one or the other for me tends to be a...

The hardest part of GMing is that the (typical) player simultaneously wants to struggle but not to fail. The heroic narrative in other media that are static and non-participatory have this arc where the character faces seemingly impossible odds and, no matter who they are, even if they are...

Blasphemy in the first paragraph of an article about 4e seem par for the course in the edition's tone deafness and the way it marketed itself.

I don't think it has to, but I do think it depends on the system. And I do also think that most games are poorly designed to handle tests of philosophy, belief, and integrity. In D&D, we'd not so much be testing the character, than testing how many resources the GM was willing to give to the...

Agreed, but note that in this case the transcript of play creates a believable story. The audience goes, "Why did the PC fall madly in love with this NPC? Oh, because a love potion coerced them!" We're not asked to believe that the PC loves the NPC for an out of game out of narrative reason...

Agreed, but the GM also "fudged out". It's the GM's responsibility to tell a good story and make events that happen within it believable. If it's not remotely believable for the PC to fall for the NPC just because the GM rolled or otherwise compelled that result, why should the play not play...

Mouseguard has amazing presentation and terrible rules. The original Vampire: The Masquerade is another example; incredible presentation, horrible rules. GURPS is always very readable and feels logical but plays horribly and it quickly become apparent that feeling logical isn't the same as...

Arn goes so far as to take it out to decimal places, so he calculates it as 3d6+1d5 for a 10 foot fall.

Yeah, somewhere. The basic rule of the system is 1d20 per 10' of falling, divided by 1d6. And yes, I hate the inelegancy of division as I have a general rule that anything other than at most division by two is too complicated for the table, but this has worked for me in its present form for a...

The complex math that Arn derives his falling damage from isn't even really the bad part of the system. All that math just resolves out to a handy dandy table of the sort common in 1e AD&D. And, as a table it's not that bad. I see what he's going for albeit there is an assumption of rigor and...

Wrong genre savvy.

Agreed. While at the time of the article realism was fetishized as the solution to all table problems, there real and meaningful table problems that they were trying to fix. They weren't just being realistic for the sake of realism. This particular problem that was trying to be addressed had...

Most people playing D&D have always struggled with this very example in various ways depending on how they conceive the hit point. When a person is hit with a spear they are not necessarily stabbed with a spear in the sense of being impaled. When in combat any weapon does damage to a target...