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Some of these spell images are producing better character portraits than the art intended to be character portraits! The wizard in "Demiplane" (who I see more as a Ranger) and the Elf in "Animate Object" are excellent. EDIT: on second glance, that's not an Elf, it's a trick of the way the hair...

It's a true fail, because you don't and can't get to the top - there's no way forward. But the consequence isn't as damaging (well, not right away anyway) as having a fail simply result in a fall; instead, you're stuck, and your options are to let go and fall, try to climb back down (at...

I always saw swarms as just a mechanically-useful way of handling hundreds or even thousands of tiny creatures - biting ants, bee swarms, Pied-Piper-esque numbers of common rats, etc. - that each individually had 0.05 of a hit point and each did 0.1 hit point damage on a hit but en masse could...

Worth noting here that the players eagerly embraced the frustration of being unable to solve the riddle. Good on them! @Faolyn , any thoughts here?

Sorry, but for a bunch of reasons that's a complete non-starter. My issue with that would be if (or when, as it's a very frequent occurrence) the risk is something as yet unknown to the character. Not everything can be or should be telegraphed; and telling the player the risk when it isn't...

As someone else already mentioned, if one was playing 2e up to date with all the splats as they came out, by the end it wasn't all that dissimilar from what 3e-at-release was. Kinda similar to how just about everything in 1e's Unearthed Arcana had already been trial-ballooned in Dragon...

Another very realistic narration for failing a climb is that the climber in effect gets stuck in place; there's no safe way forward but climbing back down doesn't look safe either. As a kid I put myself in this position more times than I care to think about.

Monster vault? In any case, in all other editions a monster's hit points and abilities are intrinsic to it and don't change based on its surroundings and-or the company it is keeping. Healer was always fairly clear but Tank and Damage Dealer used to be the martial classes (Fighter, Cavalier...

Indeed, but they'd ideally emerge in a much more detailed fashion than just the results of one roll, in - I would hope - a one-thing-leads-to-the-next manner that makes sense to all involved. In actual play, this means that while some might want to resolve that wooing and info-obtaining...

From my perspective the biggest departures seemed to be: --- monsters that changed their stats based on who-what was fighting them (i.e. the same monster, Bob the Giant, could be a minion today against a 15th-level group and an elite tomorrow against a 3rd-level group) --- general reduction of...

Chess? Hell, that's how I play D&D! :)

Not so sure on this. Your example of "gamist" is nothing but player-side metagaming. To me, gamist design wants to put the mechanics front and centre and gamist play embraces that, while non-gamist design tries to move the mechanics out of the way where it can and non-gamist play doesn't look...

Because this is the first time I realized I needed to make the distinction. Both. It's a gamble where I-as-player have a variable-by-situation degree of control over the odds I'm facing. I'd handle this situation vastly differently, ideally roleplayed in detail enough to allow for far more...

If "standing around looking at each other" is what typically happens after a whiffed task then those players really need to learn how to react to failure by thinking outside the box and trying somethng different.

Re: Bridge That it's not built on imagination has nothing to do with anything. What matters here is that it's baked into the game design that someone has to sit out each hand, and every player fully knows this going in. Why can't RPGs take the same tack and make it abundantly clear right up...

That's what game logs are for. :) And it makes sense that long campaigns are in the numeric minority, as while one group might be in a 10-year campaign another just-as-consistent similar group might have five 2-year campaigns over the same period. Thus, despite a 1:1 correlation between the...

So maybe a better metric is session counts, or session counts and years in tandem. Or hours played; though I've never known anyone to actually track that. I say this because a campaign played twice a week (be it the same group of players/characters or different, doesn't matter, as long as they...

They threw them out. For proof, click on 'Features" at the top of the page, then the second selection in the dropdown, the scroll down just a bit and read "1. Segmentation Study".

And yet within a TTRPG you still have wins and losses as a part of the flow of play; only the rulebooks mostly skip over that bit. The most obvious example of a TTRPG loss condition is the death of your character. Obviously, there's loads of others which might vary depending on the specific...

They can set up the fiction any way they like but unless my character's an idiot he's going to do what he can to manipulate that fiction to his advantage by trying to pre-emptively remove any potential complications before they can arise; ideally to the point where yes, the locked door itself is...