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Right! I know I was missing something! Sorcery points can be spent on casting a melee attack cantrip as a bonus action, with main action being freed for spells. And since you have virtually infinite spell slots, you both smite and cast. Yeah, now I remember. I don't think that's a splashing...

As a designer, I don't see a problem in splashing. Sorcadin is fun! Coffeelock is kind of neat, but whatever. I haven't played Lockadin (and am not sure how it works? Doesn't warlock already have access to smites? I must be missing something) but I imagine it's pretty fun too. Sure, they are...

I think multiclassing works mostly fine, the main issue is that non-casters don't have a uhhh bus to connect them. Paladin/Sorcerer, or Paladin/Warlock, or Warlock/Sorcerer work so nicely because they all rely on spell slots, and advancing in either of your classes benefits the other too. In...

Conceptually, I'm not a big fan of "HP as luck". It makes little sense to me, especially in games where randomness (Actual Luck) is already a big thing. Generally, I think a game should provide multiple orthogonal ways to represent the result of an attack, with bodily harm being just one of them.

Another self-defeating part of the game is... combat! There's so many options and so little restrictions in combat that it's practically impossible to deny both the monsters and the players actions. It feelsbad when you take your turn and nothing happens, and it's bad when it feelsbad, right...

Re: aesthetics Torches, just like ancient tombs full of traps, aren't aesthetics of fantasy. Corum Jhaslen Irsei didn't muck around forgotten tombs with a torch in his hand, looking out for pressure plates. You know who did? Indiana Jones. Lara Croft. Nathan Drake. Torches and dungeons aren't...

I quite like random encounters, and I find great joy in making tables to generate them. As an unsolicited advice: you should use different dice for different tables, say, d8 for a type of an undead warrior, d6 for its weapon and d4 for its armor -- that way you can roll them all at once to get...

Sure, but there is another team in basketball. There's no Team Monsters in D&D, so you can only feasibly compare players to each other. I guess parties can be compared, but that becomes a logistical nightmare. And without a clear definition of what victory means (be it beating another team, or...

Ah, right, I think I got distracted when writing, or maybe short-circuited. He wins against me fairly regularly, but loses hard to people who lose hard to me. Hiiii! Missed you! I think there's a big difference between being good at some part of the game, and being good at the game as a whole...

Many things involve skills that can't be measured. That in itself is not a problem or slight against them. But in a context of a game, without a clear measurement of success, what constitutes a "skill" becomes nebulous and "skilled play" becomes meaningless. If we conceptualize a game of skill...

The main reason is that in the context of 5e, a warlock without power turns into a pumpkin. There's a drastic power curve, and falling behind even a couple levels (let alone full annihilation of your character powers) equals becoming a liability. I don't think it's particularly surprising, to...

Quote from David Sirlin's "Playing to Win" You know what this description reminds me of? Don't look up the adventure, that's cheap cheating. Don't use knowledge your character doesn't posses, that's cheap metagaming. Don't make a busted character, that's cheap munchkinism. A big part of...

I just realized the most important question was never brought up. How can there be skilled play if no one is keeping track of who's the best player? Or did I miss something and we have leaderboards, ladders and tournaments? What the hell "skill" even means, sans that, if we cannot say with any...

Pretty much every game I've ever played. Competitive Team Fortress 2 is for all intents and purposes a different game from the game ordinary players play due to bans, format and ruleset. No two tables play Uno by the same rules. All traditional games have miriads of regional variations. I've...

I don't know. I'm playing in two campaigns and running one and very rarely get anything but full table, but I consciously organize games around having more people than slots. It is a logistic issue, sure, but solvable one. 7 people (3v3 and a referee) isn't that many people. Hurt feelings are...

I'm not super convinced about some fundamental difference between RPGs and every other type of games. In my experience, pretty much everyone is absolutely certain their favorite flavor of games is completely unique and defies comparisons or analysis through other lenses. They are right, yes...

That aside, theories of games tend to be broadly applicable to all games in the genre. Whether you are playing Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, Hearthstone or now sadly dead Elder Scrolls: Legends, you are still thinking about tempo, card advantage, depriving your opponent of resources, controlling the board...

As another tangent, I find it baffling that two opposing teams, arbitrated by an Actually Neutral Referee are such an uncommon format of games. Pretty much all the issues that drain skill from RPGs (unknown and unknowable monster composition; a player at the table with unlimited power who isn't...

I wonder if a big part of this "skilled play" debacle is just a natural consequence of deficiency and anemia of roleplaying theory. Chess theory, fighting game theory, card game theory, Team Fortress 2 6v6 theory, you name it, aren't concerned with endless taxonomy of games like RPGing theory...

As a tangent, the most annoying part is that the word "meta" when used in RPG context is completely divorced of any broader definition of the word. Having a meta game, as in, some understanding of what options you are likely to encounter, is crucial for any skill-based game featuring extensive...