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The only bad choices are the ones that create degenerate fiction. If you’re outside the classic/trad paradigm, then you’re not really trying to solve anything and thus “good/bad choice” isn’t the right metric.

1) Minsc AND Karlach?! 2) I haven't taken a close look at a lot of the recent books, but is that a pretty distinctive change to the trade dress?

I've been posting here for 25 years. Those caveats never, ever go without saying. Ever. :)

Sure. I think we should all be able to understand which techniques work with which types of games (or player inclinations) after 18,000+ posts. :) The real question is whether or not posters can properly caveat their posts to make it clear that they're talking about only a subset of games...

But in lots of games using fail-forward, generating consequences (problems) is the point of play.

If I'm running an OSR game with a defined setting, that's what I do. If I'm running a standard neotrad 5e or something more narrative, then I don't bother with anything more than a light campaign frame.

I would say that my interpretation is that, for D&D and D&D-like games with relatively high amounts of player-facing options, including race/ancestry choices, the default should be that the DM builds a fairly loose, freeform setting to accommodate player options. (I would say also this appears...

You should always label T&T. Cause I'm T&T; I'm dynamite.

All those spellings look correct to me.

Sure. And I slip between 1st-person “actor” perspective and a 3rd-person “director” perspective all the time depending on the game and the session details, when the need arises. My point to @FrogReaver was that it isn’t inherent to setting authorship to break character inhabitation during a...

If nobody remembers well enough to contradict what’s happening now, than what happened a year ago isn’t really relevant.

A black hole?

"I'm calling my next campaign The Winds of Winter".

It reminds me of the divide between people who see pictures, character, and whole scenes play out when they read fiction and those who don't.

Yea, that's where I've made pushback on these concepts over the years. In-scene authoring of predominantly color details (like @Maxperson said, narrating the levels and classes of everyone in the bar wouldn't make much sense in character) helps my immersion; having to make queries to the DM as...

I'm only saying you seem to be describing a modal shift between "perceiving" and "authoring", enough that the mental shift can disrupt immersion. And all I'm saying is that when I picture environments in character, whatever authoring I'm doing is "subconscious", because I just see an image...

I'm talking more about sensory information for this use case. Like, when I walk into a bar, on my left I see a middle-aged man, early 30s in appearance, half-elven ears, wearing a red and black checkered tunic, with a thick brown beard and thinning hair on top, holding a mostly empty glass mug...

I'd probably say it's one word, "immersiveness", attempting to encapsulate 2 related but distinct phenomena. But I do disagree in that I think you can absolutely both have an inhabitation of the character and subconsciously author at the same time. Like, I can imagine myself in character...

Right. And to link back to the previous topic, you would find (from my understanding of your perspective) being able to narrate as a player the make-up of the runes to be anti-immersive, whereas I would (this is my perspective) find it to be pro-immersive.

I thought the "rune" case was pretty orthogonal to PC history. I though the issue with the runes was the the GM defined them simply as "runes", and the PC used their successful roll to identify them as "demon-summoning runes". And that for trad play, either A) the GM shouldn't be introducing...