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Controversial, but I think Mulligan is only okay live. You can see him ripping rules off the system in real time, and it suffers for it.

Perhaps some reframing of what part of the game loop is actually being engaged is relevant here. Players basically do two things: ask the GM for more information about the situation and declare actions that take them to a new situation. Should some of these failures be viewed more as part of the...

Combat is actually an interesting counter point, precisely because it's always a timer. Assuming a standard battle without extra win conditions, you're trying to get the opponent's HP down before some threshold before the party's. Assuming some standardized DPR and that PCs can't do anything fun...

I'm mostly hoping this means a lot more content comes out to support Daggerheart. I didn't immediately love it, but there's nothing there another 6 sourcebooks couldn't fix. Hopefully this land we see a mainstream popular RPG with a steady content release schedule.

I just don't see it. You could maybe make a case for less daily resources? Late 3e was mostly marked by experimentation with resource systems altogether though, casting that as an obvious precursor to a unified progression model feels wild.

I was absolutely paying attention to those changes, and I don't at all agree. An alternative development path that worked to address 3e's problems without giving up on PC/NPC transparency seemed totally viable, even at the time. My relative youth might have been a factor (I technically played...

It's the latter that's really proven tricky, which is the whole thing in this thread right? People overindex on the play loop of whatever table they're at and then treat it as a norm of the TTRPG form.

The very idea that a DC lives outside the DM has been alien to the 5e first players I've discussed it with. Even when presented with skill mechanics, they still treat the base gameplay loop as negotiation, and treat the mechanics as a DM facing tool to help me set DCs.

Deeply unclear what "traditional" means there, and I'm worried it's probably 5e. It's very clear my high player agency rules heavy stuff isn't welcome in the OSR, but 5e first players seem to glaze over when you try to present them with a fully developed skill system, so I think I might be out...

Oh I agree, but TTRPA doesn't have quite the same ring.

Yeah, that's pretty good. The point about solvability/optimization is too small, but it's a start. It's certainly better than this: Competition is a tool, not the point, challenge is necessary to reach the appropriate state, but not a metric that can be maximized for greater success. The point...

I feel like the traditional answer is "make the GM roll for it secretly" which is certainly one use of random tables. :p I proposed a compromise position earlier that might work for more people: slow the process down by introducing a GM side meta currency that has to accumulate and be spent...

I realize I've been shuffled into a 3rd rail, but I don't think that's quite fair. As you pointed out, everyone is fundamentally concerned with making player input matter and presenting novel events and things to interact with. The precise nature of what "matter" means and the exact...

I'd argue the issue lies in the mechanisms of interaction, but that leads us quickly out of short summation territory.

A thought I'm having on the fail forward discussion; is this a division of responsibility question? Setting aside the tools they have to change "the fiction" and the gameplay concerns I have, it almost reads to me like the real debate is over who is responsible to propose a change in the game...

Oh I see. Sorry, I was already drifting away from the initial example, which I would read as unparsably incomplete. The player hasn't specified an action specific enough to resolve, I would be asking how they wanted to achieve that goa. Or, more likely given how I've played in the past, the...

Sure. It would also be a terrible game, with basically no agency. I mean, I don't really care, personally. Simplicity is widely overvalued on RPG design, and is frustratingly mistaken for elegance, or treated as "cheap" in terms of design space, when it's really quite expensive. You give up a...

Sure, I'm commenting on an issue I had with the framing you both were using. Does it matter? If there's a factor that renders noise relevant (i.e. someone to hear it) then a player might want to do something about it. If not, then it doesn't matter if of they do, though perhaps they'll feel it...

No, I believe the design task is to set a series of rules that can as completely as possible adjudicate any player proposal, using knowable, player facing rules. That most systems fail at this is not an indictment of the goal. Obviously, some abstraction is necessary, but you can get pretty far...

I worry whenever "challenge" gets used this way. There's nothing challenging about a die roll; you don't demonstrate more or less skill by rolling a 5 or a 15. The challenge is the problem (getting the heirloom off the mantle or whatever) and all of the rolls and action declarations are tools to...