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The ominous music, from the orchestra on the bus, might have caused enough anxiety to cause involuntary urination; in which case it was both diegetic AND diuretic.

I agree, more or less. I don't like the remedy of the DM veto, the declaration "You can't do that." I prefer the remedy of another player asking "Wait, do our characters know - at this point - that thunder damage will be extra effective?" If the barbarian's player responds "No, my character...

I am indeed insisting on roleplaying exactly the way I like to role-play... at a table where, every week, that style is welcomed and encouraged. Last session, I told the DM "I think I know why the bad guys attacked this village, but I don't think my PC has figured it out yet", and the DM gave me...

Not exactly, no. Nor can any person can sing perfectly on pitch, and yet some humans still sing, because many of us do it well enough for entertainment purposes. Sure, there's a discrepancy between character knowledge and player knowledge. I cannot bring that gap to zero point zero, nor do I...

I see you rollin'. I hope you're open to friendly amendments. RPGs are structured forms of collaborative storytelling which *can* include other elements. Sometimes they are structured forms of collaborative storytelling *and* also a miniatures war game. (Can they be a floor wax AND a dessert...

Getting an observer onto a hilltop is a tactical goal, to gain line-of-sight to an area - or to a specific target. Even without artillery, getting line-of-sight could be significant, if it lets the commander learn the location (and size and composition) of enemy forces. A small team of experts -...

Is that like Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days", but on a flat world? I'd play it! Ferocious klingorks, wise gentle vulkelves, greedy ferengkobolds...

The webcomic "Order of the Stick" started with the PCs fighting some goblins. Where and why? Not yet established; the fight scene sufficed to set up a joke. I dunno how much the author had thought ahead, and how much he made decisions episode by episode. Hundreds of episodes later, the setting...

Or in non-verbal, non-linguistic forms. You mentioned the Tomb of Horrors picture gallery. Any map which is more illustrated than the "no-frills" minimal map. If I draw a picture of my PC, that's also presentation of material. Use of figurines; if a figurine is more expressive than a chess...

BRG, you don't use any genre tropes when you run games? Who are these "lots of people" who run TRPGs without using genre tropes? Could you name, say, five of them? I've done a lot of TRPG that's squarely within the stock genres, such as Western, superhero, swords & sorcery, science fiction...

I am generally in favor of a "the more you do things at the edge of your ability, the more you learn" system. That said, I disagree on whether failure is essential. If I try a skateboard trick many times, the failures might get me closer to the moment when I can pull off that trick, but the...

A method which predicts people's behavior... particularly, their unwanted behavior? Dude, you've just demonstrated that *I already have one*, because you have responded exactly as I predicted: "a few people* are going to jump in, and declare that such a resource is unpossible..." I did not...

Sounds a LOT like you're a Paladin with an Oath of Vengeance. If you can mystically sense their presence, and if you can do magical extra damage against them, then that's definitely what you are.

I'm looking for resources for GMs at con or store games, who want to keep their games inclusive, and particularly who want pointers on (a) spotting misogynists and bigots early, when they're "testing the waters" and (b) deterring them or nipping them in the bud, before they start overtly...

"looking carefully to see if anything is out of place" isn't an action declaration? In D&D 5E, I'd interpret that as taking the Observe action each six seconds, while moving at base rate. Similar rules apply in Hero System. If a guard were watching Grugr, then that guard might notice Grugr's...

Here are chapters 13 and 14 of Book 6 of Caesar's history of the Gallic Wars (or rather, a translation of them into English, thus losing or warping various nuances and connotations from the original Latin). You tell me: does this match your understanding of True Neutral? Chapter 13 Throughout...

One can consider Gygax's favorite novels, and make reasonable guesses at how and why he wrote up various classes, spells, monsters, etc. in D&D. In the case of the Druid, I would bet long odds that Gygax was trying to write rules for the druids depicted in L. Sprague de Camp's stories about...

That is true if TRPG is literary, and it is also true if TRPG is not literary.

If I wanted to find out for my own curiosity, whether I might have any Roma ancestry, then I would use historical, genealogical or anthropological parameters for determining what counts as Roma ancestry. If, however, I were responding to a census inquiry, in Berlin, in May of 1939, then I'd...

Ah, so it's for explaining D&D to people whose conception might come from "Dark Dungeons" by Jack Chick, or from the "Dungeons and Dragons" movie? (And of those two, which is worse?) Are movies literary? There are movies which are works of art, and there's also "Ishtar", "Gigli" and...