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@EzekielRaiden I'm not terribly interested getting deeper into guideline/rule semantic quagmire. But I agree with you that overriding the rules should be rare, and if one finds that they need to constantly do so to get the results they want, then the rules are bad — at least for the purpose one...

One might argue that rules of a game tend to be pretty inviolable. Like we cannot just decide in chess that a bishop can this time move diagonally because they do a cool stunt. But we allow that sort of exceptions with RPG rules all the time, which makes them more like guidelines rather than...

No. They mean that things will usually work in certain way, with the caveat that there might be some exceptions.

Yes, at least 2014 ones are terrible, but they are terrible to the direction of things being way too easy...

I think 4e pretty clearly proved that.

I don't think this is really playing a roleplaying game in a meaningful sense. It is just some combat puzzle solving.

I really don't think issue with TPKs is mainly about "losing progress." It is about disconnect in the narrative. So what you do if you want to continue, is to find a narrative threat that connects the new characters to what the old ones were doing.

That's an utterly terrible idea. It totally destroys any tension caused by dangerous situations.

So my experience is that past fourth level 5e characters are pretty much unkillable, and certainly are not even close of any sort of genuine danger if using 2014 encounter building guidelines, you can comfortably go way past deadly. Yeah, before that they are somewhat more fragile, but you're...

In my decades of playing RPGs, this has happened once, (aside some horror style scenarios where “everyone dies horribly in the end” is the point,) and it was at the very end of the campaign at the final confrontation where one PC decided to join the enemy. It might have happened in some games we...

I rather feel that at this point it stops being linear! OK. So linearity is in the prepped material but not necessarily at the game as it happens? This makes sense, I guess. I just think that preparing stuff this way easily leads to railroading, or at least some privileging of the prepared...

I rather feel that in a functional improv style the details that the players pick up should be made to matter. So if a throwaway line makes the players suspect that something shady is going on in the old abbey, then when players decide to investigate it the GM makes it so that something...

It is of course unlikely that any game is 100% railroad all the time, but different games certainly will have different amounts of it. So I think it still coherent to have the definition to be the platonic idea of a railroad, and then comparing to that we can gauge how much a railroad the game...

I don't see how this is an issue. Like I literally had gnolls as antagonist in the early part of my current campaign. The gnolls and the humans had strained relationship for a while in this place, but recently the gnolls had become way more aggressive and seemed that they wanted to full on...

One of my ancient Exalted campaigns ended with the world being destroyed. And that was due one PC actually deciding to join the big bad at a crucial moment after the big bad's "join me" villain speech. I really didn't see that coming! We played Exalted after that though, albeit come think of it...

I certainly noticed that distancing too, and I am sure some of it was in case they wanted or needed to ditch the D&D. But I think the main reason was the animated shows. They don't want to use WotC IP for those.

But if Aragorn dies, the War of the Ring still goes on, and someone will try to defend Minas Tirith. It is still the same story. But if Conan dies at the Tower of the Elephant, and then it is Valeria who becomes the lover and companion of Bêlit, the Queen of the Black Coast, then there is...

Then again, I think that in campaign with clear overarching plot, it is in certain sense easier to continue after a TPK with different characters and still have it be the same campaign, as the plot acts as the connecting tissue. Like if Frodo gets killed, someone still has to take the ring to...

Well, I'm no sandbox purist, and I like I said previously whilst my D&D game has some sandboxy elements it probably does not qualify as a pure one. But I think that in any good sandbox game the players can influence the content of the game massively. They might not influence content of the...

Of course they are people. But they are not humans.