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Yeah, its got a different take. Its got some mechanically interesting parts too, though there were also some odd decisions in a couple places I'm not really sold on.

I think Vault does a combination of this if I'm not conflating.

I tended to find the ones at Del Taco fairly consistent. Didn't eat them much because there wasn't much else there I liked, but on the odd occasions when I did, I always enjoyed them.

I don't think that's true. Those things were all too visible in the first OD&D book; it was going to be hard for players not to see them unless they never looked at any of the books at all, and that's a pretty big ask. It certainly wasn't true with any group I ever encountered, and I'm not...

There might be a few cases where something had a broad enough potential consequences that I'd decide letting it stand was just a really bad idea, grit my teeth and bring it up knowing I'd get some serious blowback, but it'd have to be something I thought had really bad knock-on effects.

I don't even think its really necessary to make them relevant; often they're just to inform how the character will be played. I'm not sure any of Ked's backstory every mattered to anyone else in the game (well, other than my wife, who was playing Ked's girlfriend (and later in the campaign...

I tend to prefer them myself, but there are absolutely people who really hate them, especially in the D&D sphere. And of course some who like crits but not fumbles.

That latter one is tricky; its one thing to say "This rule decision that benefited me is wrong, and I don't think you should do it"; it has a different tone of its "This rule decision that benefited Joe is wrong, and I don't think you should do it." I'd have to think hard if I did the latter...

That was essentially what the player was sending me permission to do.

That can be a little odd. I've got a player in my 13th Age game who came in as the "Champion of Concord" (one of the major cities in the default setting), and that'd have been a bit odd for a 1st level character (even though 13th Age 1st level characters are probably more like 2nd Level in most...

Even in cases where that's not true, the NPC is going to spend far less time interacting with dice in general; even if events are happening off screen, few GMs are going to play them out to see how they come out).

That's one of the things about backstories; they can sometimes supply useful material to incorporate into the campaign as a whole. (But then, I spent half my gaming career running superhero campaigns, where having character backgrounds that add pretty big chunks of setting in is kind of...

Yeah, we might have been able to do that back in the OD&D days, but that's because OD&D characters were almost schematic in their structure, and the longest thing you probably had to do was picking gear. I wouldn't bother with character generation for a con game these days (though I might let...

It isn't necessarily about heroic things, but how their life lead them to be an adventurer in the first place. When I wrote the backstory for Kedric, the aasimar Champion/Bard I had in a PF2e game, the backstory was mostly family history explaining his aasimar-ness, and then a bit of story...

Yeah, this is why I wouldn't play any of the XCOMs--or almost any game where I don't have autosaves enabled--on Iron Man on a bet.

While its a risk, its not a given they'll be hostile to it. I generally have pretty substantial backstory for most characters, but if I'm a game where death is on the table, its on the table. (I wouldn't bother with that for a one-off game like a con game though; even if I had some of it in my...

Like I said, there's fairness and there's fairness. Some versions of that are harder to achieve than others.

Yet you'll still get people who deny it exists at all in the wild, just because they've never seen it personally.

Depending on their definition of "fair", it was at least an unreasonable expectation, because using some of those definitions its questionable if its even possible. There are other definitions one could use where its possible: if someone's definition is "once a situation is set up, its allowed...

He made his, I made mine. He opened the door to a gamist note when mentioning the players enjoyed getting crits.