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What? No you don't. It's quite possible you have no agency in any of those situations, if there was no way to know anything about what was behind the door in the first place. The last example you gave just ensures that's the case. There's no meaningful difference between a choice with a random...

I checked out a little bit when we starting throwing around immersion as I've long since settled on a perfectly workable technical understanding of the term and don't really care what anyone else is doing with it*, but this bothers me, precisely because it's a poor use of "game." My critique of...

I've gone back and reread True Sorcery recently, and wow am I full of nostalgia. I always wanted to try a game built around that casting system, and it honestly looks unthinkably heavy for anyone I play with now. I just don't think I could even sell my friends on why you'd want to mess with that...

Fundamentally, 3e is a massive design task. I just don't know that anyone wants to do it again, for what is now a tiny and shrinking corner of the market. It made a lot more sense when its assumptions were normative.

See, this is a perfect example of the problem, as I think several of those things are incompatible with the underlying 3e design ethos. You might be able to represent role as a general set of levels and/or prepared feat packages, but definitely not as templates, and I'd hold NPC/PC design parity...

I'm sorry? You seem to have just randomly appropriated a term someone else defined to make a specific point? The whole point of that example was demonstrating that it would be unsatisfying and unpleasant to abstract the specifics of the two proposed situations down to a die roll, and instead...

I've never found this argument compelling, because you can get usually get far enough on what's ruled out to have a gameable state. If nothing else, whatever the GM comes up with to defeat your alarm this time is something you can prepare for next time, and at the very least they'll have to make...

Scaling feats are absolutely one proposed solution that floated around. Other ideas included simplifying prerequisites down to strictly necessary features (like spellcasting or ranks in a relevant skill) and then just tying them to level. The idea there being you'd present level appropriate...

That we're not particularly good at it has really no bearing on whether it's useful and produces interesting gameplay, especially when there is literally no other alternative. Moving from "the player's ability to learn about the fictional situation is flawed, because the GM's creation and...

The thread has largely moved on, but this discussion tickled something in my brain, and reminded me we've had a similar exchange before. I think we might be running into a values problem when discussing this that we're not actually closing the loop on. You've focused regularly on skill or...

I'm very fond of the True Sorcery system, but it's heavy in a way that feels wildly out of time now.

Fantasy Craft's tricks were a significant improvement on this style of feat design. They took a different resource that was more plentiful, and they were all explicitly written as riders on existing actions, with an inherent limitation that you can't use more than 1 per action (barring some...

I believe I was pretty clear. The GM attempts to map from prior established facts and causal chains of events to get to the current board state. My whole initial point was that reducing that process to a single thing, instead of acknowledging that you could use a bunch of approaches with...

Nope. Only one of those things is true in the board state that is at stake. We can quibble about how we get to that point, but we have used our limited technology, the brain of the GM mapping from prior events and established facts about the world, to get to one singular result that is true of...

I mean, if I had my druthers it would look like: More detailed skills that scaled better/faster to appropriately high leveled actions Consolidating later skill usages into the base skill system Universalized spell DC scaling (scaling DC with spell level was a bad idea, I'm less sold than...

Yeah, absolutely. We've got ongoing design work derived from basically every other iteration of D&D at this point. 3e is the only edition that's really treated as closed, we're even seeing a spike of interest in 4e derived designs lately. The 3pp market for 3e/PF1 was massive, if all you're...

Good feat design? :p Really though, the answer is design progress and completeness. PF1 was absolutely just nibbling around the edges of change, and at best cleaned up things like the weirdness of skill scaling and dead class levels, and doing strange things, like doubling the number of feats...

Alright, give me a little credit as a person who's played games before. I don't particularly like poker (I'm in the particular board game camp that objects to gambling as a game mechanic in general), but I by no means don't understand it. I'd have more fun playing a round of The Gang, but...

Unfortunately, I think PF1 ate the opportunity for a game with this design lineage. The problem is that 3e is a quite heavy design task, and the audience that is specifically interested in it has proven to be significantly smaller than expected. 5e is mostly proof that a lot of the audience...

Some classes (like Heralds, the Paladin equivalent) get access to spells by thematic tag. It's pretty common to get "add all spells of the Law school to your class spell list" as a feature.