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Manbearcat, in fairness, a lot of what you saw there is not so much lockstep with process simulation as being bad at probability. Usually, people that are serious about process simulation get that stage out of the way pretty darn quick. :D

You guys have to remember that "meta gaming" is a concept that for many people in their formative roleplaying years (heh) was treated as a "Bad Wrong Fun". For some it became the bad kind of dogma--that is, dogma where people have kept the dogmatic statements and attitudes but lost the...

My contention is that maybe those same designers working for a small company that owned the rights independent of something like Hasbro (with all that entails) perhaps could do it, but I don't think the designers can do it with the current anvils tied to them. Maybe I'm just inclined this way...

That's the original. I've got BW Revised and Gold. In Revised, it's page 65. in the first book, "Earning Artha". That section has all the ways that you can earn artha, and the fast majority of them are from the BITs. For example, there are five basic ways to get Fate: dramatically playing a...

The more salient point is that even if you did effectively make these changes in Burning Thac0, it would play marginally more like D&D, but still not very much like it all. "Fight for what you believe" supported by mechanics is not "Kill/Trick/Evade the monster, get the treasure, get power"...

The mechanics are inseparable from how the story is told. That same insight that tells you how to play it isn't just tacked on. It's telling you what will cause the mechanics to work. Because one of the reasons the insight is there and so clear is that there is very little in BW that isn't...

No, I think D&D and BW are different because I've played all versions of D&D, some of them quite a lot, and I've also played BW and seen firsthand exactly why it is different. This has nothing to do with role playing pretension, and that you even suspected I was being a role playing snob by my...

My issues are more orthogonal to the Next design itself, though the Next design and discussion is bringing things into relief that I've suspected for some time. I think, for example, that it is very difficult to write a truly excellent game that takes a lot of books to present coherently. So...

I think we are back hard on the old (dawn of hobby old) point that running a fantasy RPG session shares a lot with reading a fantasy novel, but in other ways they are nothing alike. This is critically the difference between "simulation" and "emulation". If you want, for example, Aragorn to be...

There is a huge difference between "D&D-ish" and "Plays like D&D". You can make BW, via Burning Thac0, the former but not the latter. This is because there is no appreciable advancement in BW without exercising the BW reward cycle--use your beliefs, instincts, and traits to get into trouble...

KM, I could go into a ton of detail, but somehow I don't think it would get us anywhere. Let me summarize my position as that I don't think yours (and WotC's position, insomuch as it follows yours) is intellectually consistent. Rather, it's a bunch of sleight of hand to keep people from...

Just to be clear, my comment about merging them back was along the lines of the from an archetypical range perspective, the warlord has got more call to be a class than the barbarian, maybe the ranger, and even the paladin unless you get too caught up in there is something really class about the...

I'd love for them to get serious about folding things like the warlord back into the fighter. That would mean they'd get serious about providing some options not buried into the class structure to give more breadth. Then that would mean they'd get serious about removing most other classes...

No matter how you accomplish it, the more you make the rules elegant and clear (natural language, keywords, or other means), the less room you leave for players or DMs to pull stupid game-lawyer tricks with pieces of the rules. Whereas longer rules with lot of specifics make such play easy...

Late to the DQ party, but I did want to say I read that every year or so, and still think it had some great ideas buried under a ton of too fiddly mechanics. In particular, the way it had the intersection of magic, skills (professions + a few separate skills) + weapon use + abilities being...

My group tried an idea similar to this with a wacky Fantasy Hero variant a long time ago, and it worked surprisingly well for a system that a few of threw together in a dorm room one weekend. :D I hadn't considered using the 4E boons to do the same thing before this conversation, but had...

Just so you guys know, BW is certainly heavily influenced by Forge theory, but not on the the single GNS axis, and not even on the later creative agenda categories. It's got a heavy dose of all three, though the simulation part is usually more macro than micro. I'm hard pressed to think of a...

The circumstance that more or less ended my "naive simulation" phase was when I realized that common sense wasn't all that common. ;) Right up until that moment, I still thought that a game could model the physics of the game world, and would then just work to produce what people wanted. Edit...

Yes, I've always thought that consequences of skill checks in D&D are easier to do than most system--thus being a shame that we've always had to stick to the mundane ones. A character "pushing" his skill in a fantasy world full of powerful magic probably would have interesting consequences of...

Right. And stacking skills from different axes is problematic--you need to deal with a good way to handle the overlap when it happens and the disjointed messes when it happens. Plus, you'd like for "ability scores" to be their own axis, mostly. A fighter getting a mild boost to Str is...