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Absolutely none. You might be unwilling to conjure ten thousand tarrasques, doesn't change the fact that your will is the only limiting factor at play. And can a player take a look at the encounter at hand, calculate the CR and say "hey, this encounter is way too easy" (or "this encounter is...

This is awesome, thank you

Yeah, but other games don't try to pretend like it's anything other than GM letting the PCs win. And idk about "extreme bad faith". The difference between adding one goblin, hell, one HP to an existing goblin and conjuring ten thousand tarrasques is non-existent.

I must admit, maybe I just chalk up people being bad to them not understanding the game, but pretty much every time I had a some variant of this interaction with them: -- I shoot goblin with my crossbow! -- ...you have firebolt on your character sheet, it does more damage, and you have higher...

I'm not sure this line can be drawn. A level designer doesn't participate in the game and has no ability to change stuff on the fly. A game master can and players cannot tell the difference between something invented right on the spot and something prepared beforehand. If, say, monster list and...

I'm not sure if this analogy applies, to be honest. A) Test is (at least supposed to be) non-arbitrary. Yes, teacher can set harder questions, but it's not like they feasibly can ask first-graders about eigenvectors. B) Teacher is (at least supposed to be) to have a greater expertise in the...

Let's say you are playing a game of Warhammer for an agreed upon number of points, and you see your opponent placing a tad too many models to the table. You can check their army list and say: "Hey, there's only 3 tactical squads in your list, why are there four on the table?" (note: they are not...

It was intended to be an OR operation (which, when negated, becomes AND): a test of skill to be legitimate should be either not arbitrary or be set in stone. A fight in a game like dnd is both completely arbitrary (there's no reason there's ten goblins, and not fifty, or five) and impossible to...

I don't think it really matters whether it's over 9000 or just a couple of points beyond the guidelines. They are still unenforceable and, thus, completely meaningless. The fundamental issue doesn't go anywhere: GM has to pull punches and can't create the most brutal adversity she can, so...

I'm not talking about the narrative, though. I'm talking about the test of player skill at playing the game. The player negotiating about the challenge at hand a) runs contrary to the Czege principle (which I personally don't subscribe to, but still) b) again, hinges upon the GM being willing...

They would, if the text of the book didn't stress so much that they are completely optional, and they were enforceable. What can you do, even if you know that the current encounter is CR over 9000? Especially considering you are not even supposed to know that in the first place. And then there...

Rolling dice in BitD doesn't really require comparison, though, just basic recognition. You don't need to compare 6 to 4, you just know that 6 is more than 4, and you know what 6 looks like.

This is the point. The only possible way a player can succeed in dnd if the GM lets them succeed. The only reason they won a fight is because GM decided not to bring reinforcements. Didn't, but could. Could, but didn't. Ooh but she needs a narrative justification! Yeah, those cost nothing. I'm...

If you are talking about dice rolls, they have nothing to do with it, "knowledge check" is a term from fighting games, and I've included the definition right into my post: "things that work if and only if the opponent has no clue how to deal with them". Here's a more in-depth one from the...

I can see how it can be the case in the AD&D days, I'm not sure if it's applicable now, when the internets exist, AND the current edition is "mature", with more or less established meta. There's a concept of "knowledge check", things that work if and only if the opponent has no clue how to deal...

Aside V: on skill To be frank, I don't believe in "player skill" in RPGs, at least those which pride itself on it (like OSR), as there's no real way to measure even an approximation of it. Even outside of all the high-level competitions with prizes and stuff, when someone says, "I've beaten...

As I said, I don't think it makes much sense to classify things at this level as "fun" or "not fun". Before TPK happened, there was, well, the rest of the game. A game that started with TPK was probably not fun, thus, failed, yeah, I don't think it's crazy to suggest so.

Yeah, sometimes. Often, I'd say. This was not the case here, though.

My definition of fun is very simple: I'm having fun when I don't wish I was somewhere else doing something else. There are things that are frustrating on a minor scale (like losing a character and having to create another one), but I'm not sure if it makes sense to classify things as "fun" or...

Aside III: on "fun" "Fun" is not the goal of playing a game, it's a bare minimum requirement. A game being fun is like your meal being edible. The lowest possible bar to clear. If the game isn't fun, then it utterly miserably spectacularly failed. "You do everything right as long as you didn't...