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That's D&D though isn't? The Ranger was designed so you could play Aragorn. Honestly it feels to me like the throughline to Gygax to 5e is that the game was designed to offer a grab bag of character options without much care to how they all fit together outside of the dungeon or adventure at...

Why exactly do we care if Forgotten Realms or Critical Role is more popular?

Honestly I think the popularity of D&D has something to do with this. The DM can always just throw in a fight and by the time it's done it's time for everyone to go home and the DM has a week to think of what to do next. And more generally I think a lot of players find role-playing in...

That's because the secret halfling ninjas assassinate the troublemakers in advance.

Ok I guess I've been successfully trolled.

I think you mean so far as the characters know. It's pretty obvious to the players. I don't get how people can't see the distinction here. Bob the Paladin. I go for a walk on the Moors. DM: Really? There's a severe thunderstorm blowing and you're wearing full plate. Bob: Yeah. I'll take my...

I am talking about the same thing! What happens when 12 Orcs encounter a party? They threaten the party, demand their surrender etc. What happens when 1 Orc encounters the party? Clearly he can't win a fight against them, so there's a different sort of encounter. Maybe he runs away and the...

A random encounter is not even close to being a procedurally generated adventure. A random encounter is not a "chaff" encounter. If a DM is throwing in random encounters as some kind of punctuation to a game than that DM is, sad to say, completely cluessless about what they are doing. A random...

I find it interesting how leadership is so often confused with authority.

I actually find that having Tolkien elves wandering around in a setting that also has fey elves just weird. My preference is to cut out the Tolkien elves.

"Chasten wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men, reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies, it is the other way around; magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane." From Jonathon Strange...

You could, but you'd find that English already had a lot more pronouns back then.

I think they're two different failure states, rather than two sides of the same coin. There's lots of ways to thread the needle between the two. Justin Alexander's three clue rule is one good example

I often think that railroading may be best understood as a subjective player state. The 'feeling of being railroaded' At least in that case, I think we could all agree that there is some sort of problem somewhere.

A few points on the general discussion. - People really need to be clear if railroad is inherently a dysfunctional state or not. The term was certainly invented to describe dysfunction so it seems a little bit weird with people saying "this type of gaming is a railroad and that's ok.". It's a...

The GM doesn't have to be, but the GM is usually going to be the one to fall into that position by default, especially with a group of players who don't know each other very well. Edit: But I did think after writing that I probably should have said it was an refusal of leadership rather than a...

My experience playing my Cavalier with Shield Master and Sentiel was that I could do the mechanical sticky part of things pretty well. Sure I would have been more sticky if I wasn't limited to one reaction, but I didn't find it to much of an issue. No the issue was that I just wasn't tough...

Well we'll have to disagree. As a player I'd be walking out of the door. EdIt: Well probably not as a first response. I'd instead be initating the conversation the GM should have done. But I'd have little expectation of coming back to the game.

You guy do realise that by neutral arbiter in this specific context I meant the GM should not just resolve all actions of a PC without any regard to how the rest of the group may feel about the situation. Player: "My Barbarian is going to rage and start killing everyone in this town, men women...

The reason for that is the 13 year campaign though. That's not a universal situation. Everyone knows each other really well. If I'm running an open game at a meet-up I'm a lot more pro-active in having the DM job be also a leadership position then I am with either of my longer term regular...