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That's not an accurate description of all early D&D. Some, but not all. Dave Arneson's Castle Blackmoor scenarios had mission objectives other than "extract the gold from the dungeon to the surface", such as finding out why the Baron's wizard had vanished into the dungeon (and whether he was...

I am honored; thank you; though in all too many cases, I'm merely clearing a low bar. Oh. That's an ambitious scope of hypothesis. In linguistics, AFAIK, an assertion about "every known language humans have ever spoken (or signed or whistled or written)" is a possible width of scope, and...

If it is, then what? If it's not, then what? If there is zero difference between the outcome of "RPG is literary" and the outcome of "RPG is not literary", then my answer is "Oh, yes, it TOTALLY is", just so that you can have something to disagree with. Also, there's an invisible pink teapot...

Ritual casting of Wish, six times an hour, all day long. What could go wrong?

I'm currently playing a Sorcerer-Warlock. Any spell he can cast, he can cast again after an hour's rest. The difference between healing with a long rest, and casting healing spells five times with short-rest recharges, is that you can only Long Rest once per day. There are many magic systems...

A parallel with a movie, so take with the usual caveats about movies versus TRPG, but we're squarely in agreement AFAIK: "The Karate Kid" does not end with the final round of combat in which the protagonist knocks out the antagonist with the go-for-broke crane kick. If the DM wrapped up the...

You hold yourself (sometimes stubbornly) to a standard of rigor, in the search for precise understandings of the relationships between preparation and play, between process and narrative, and so forth, which exceeds anything I could impose on you; so IMO it matters less whether *I think* my...

I dream of a rules set which supports those scenes, and also the Nine Walkers fighting their way through Moria, and also Usual Suspects. Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, playing Inigo Montoya versus Wesley... no, wait, in Captain Blood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uog-mJYyloQ

I suggest, instead, that the UK, the French and the Germans are all "dwarves", in the sense that they were offered technology which allowed each of them to greedily acquire wealth; at the cost of hubris, moral downfall, the mutual devastations of WWII and the loss of their colonial empires...

That's true in a duel, when there's no one and nothing else involved. If those two experts are blocking each other's blows, clang clang clang, in a burning building, then perhaps the roll which ends the fight is the DM roll on round 5 determining that the second story collapses into flaming...

Player curation has given me excellent results. When I run a convention game, "Please be ready with your action" is an early recourse, and "Apparently you spent those six seconds pondering your options. Next player, what's your action?" is not far behind. Chess can move quickly or slowly. In...

Darren Watts ran a Golden Age Champions game, in which the Tunguska Event also involved Baba Yaga. I think it knocked her for a loop, then she revived in 1939, but I forget the details. Several players in that group also had roles in his acquisition of Hero System in order to publish 5E. I...

I guess the question here, if elves and dwarves aren't literal "people who aren't humans, who use fire and language, and have co-existed openly with humans for centuries", is the role of dwarves and elves. They're populations which send representatives to the Council of Elrond, and that can be...

There are boardgames such as Pandemic, which are (and which simulate) a more or less dynamic cooperative activity that involves meaningful decision making by all parties... but not in the ways unique to combat. Combat involves immediate physical danger AND fast pacing. There are other activities...

If his main goal is to learn from you, then he might learn faster on your side of the DM screen. If you meet with him before the session starts, and go over "here's the foes you will run, here's their motives, here's the stat blocks"... and ALSO go over "here's what I want from the scene...

The Tunguska Event could have a role. If it involved aliens, and/or awakened some Siberian trees, perhaps that's your Bombadil: older than the BBEG, and unimpressed with the BBEG's power, and also not going to solve the problem for the heroes.

One difficulty in the transition is high technology and the relationship with the past. In JRRT's LotR, people generally don't increase in power by innovation. The Three Rings were powerful, Sauron learns from them and creates the One Ring, and then no one, in centuries, improves on the Three or...

If I played a variant human with that feat, I'd prefer a spell which I'm likely to cast once, every session, and have that one casting make a difference. I think the Life Cleric bonus on Goodberry is cheesy, because Goodberry is a Transmutation, rather than a healing Evocation, but the ruling...

Today I Learned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zou_huo_ru_mo I see parallels to Jedi training, and the call of the Dark Side.

There's a BBEG who designed the One Thing, perhaps in a lab near Chernobyl. The BBEG also created the Nine Cyborgs. He did not create the Three; he merely communicated with their makers, and learned from that process. He has never touched or corrupted them. The Seven were malware. He gave them...