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I'm well aware, and find your take reductive, self-serving and unhelpful. That you can't differentiate which of two designs might serve me better says more about the limitations of your framework for evaluating them, or more charitably, that your goals for play are too narrow. You'll simply have...

Woah, we're not interchangeable. I think games can and should specify all possible points of interaction while still using task resolution; plans are built out of stacking actions drawn from a set of pre-knowable mechanics. My sense of Micah is that they're more amenable to GM designed...

You're turning over a ton of control to randomness in this hypothetical challenge focused system. The appeal of the alarm spell is precisely that it does not interact with randomness in that way; it requires specific countermeasures, and if the opposition doesn't use them, they fail. The...

Other way around. Technology is compositionally different from magic. Issuing a worker with a mage hand rod to get hard to reach items is a technological use of magic. Magic is about some kind of situational alternative to physics, technology is about finding useful applications of principles...

I've always struggled thematically with that take, not so much because of what it says about magic, but what it says about about technology. It's not reducible to a domain the same way magic is; tech is just combining known properties in useful ways. In settings where you try to put it alongside...

That just sounds like more reason to put it into the PHB. If there's military applications for non-combat magic, or as is more often the case, economic applications of combat magic, then the setting rapidly starts to feel artificial if you try and draw a division between the two. If a PC can...

I'm firmly in the "anything" school, but I'd prefer it be significantly better distributed. The Wizard spell list already could easily support 7-8 classes. It would hardly be D&D if it couldn't support the basic utility of stoneshape, invisibility, and summon monster, but I don't particularly...

I quite like the model in this product: Ozaka's Guide to Legions

No, precisely the opposite. My point was that the fiat-less mechanic demonstrated cannot do some of the things the alarm spell as presented could. I am absolutely not making the system doesn't matter point, I'm saying this fiat/no-fiat divide isn't a particularly incisive divide (or at least...

As always, this fails to consider limitations on what the GM might "narrate" that live outside any individual act of resolution. The states in which the GM might or might not "introduce a threat" are not necessarily unknowable, unknown, nor generally equivalent outside of the alarm spell. Neatly...

Lol. Yeah, that is the classic biggest poorly thought out rules implication of tying subdual/fatigue to blunt weapons. It also interacted poorly with constructs.

I'm not so sure that's true. You might get a +damage class feature to a specific damage type, but the highest level of specialization you can get is generally tied to a weapon group, not to a specific weapon. Fencing Blades is still 5 different swords. Definitely though it's probably best to...

Given that they all worked the same for the minionesque "standard characters" that would have to be a special character which are supposed to be relatively climatic, and if you're failing subdual/stress saves the desire should be death spiraling pretty quickly, I don't think it's a huge problem...

If you're going to really lean in to differentiation, I don't think you can do better than Fantasy Craft in a D20 base. 6 categories of proficiency broken into 4-6 specialty sub groups with 4 weapons each, all with distinct properties, plus an additional customization system.

I love the mechanically minded character stuff, but I can't stand the isekai/VR/reincarnation/recent gamified apocalypse/etc. angle. The "person from our world" everyman frame narrative is thankfully starting to die off and was pretty vestigial in most cases, but it's a real struggle to push...

I was very excited by the surprise Monster Train 2 demo, which is very smartly taking the existing formula and simply dropping in completely refreshed content.

Absolutely, the wizard has exactly the opposite problem. Fighter gets smaller with every other martial class, and already has to be small to cope with it's lack of archetypal power source. Wizard is too broad, and prevents any specific caster from having very specific identities and specialized...

You could also maybe split out a Weaponmaster. Fighter is a uniquely limiting archetype, almost entirely defined by what hasn't been carved out of it by other classes.

HP is always an interesting razor, because both sides of the meat debate tend to firmly believe their approach is the obviously intuitive one, and look at the rest of the rules/fiction and say "but if we did it your way, all this stuff doesn't make any sense." The difference is whether they're...

Really? That feels like an easily solvable problem. Instead of baking scaling into the items, just make it a default calculated part of the character, maybe tied into attunement somehow. Give it a name like "resonance value" or something. If it's in a box on your character sheet and items were...