Search results

My apologies. I got about three hours of sleep last night and just...completely forgot to write the others. 2: While your (Lanefan's) math adds up--"each person is good at 1/4 of things, therefore to be good overall you need four or more people"--it doesn't actually equate to effective gameplay...

Businesses do, in fact, have hierarchy. Often one actually backed up by the force of law, ultimately. Friendships, in general, do not. If you wish to assert that a leisure-time activity has an innate and inherent hierarchy, you'll need to defend that, not just assert it. Because, as I said...

It would seem inaccurate caricature is not exclusive to those who are critical of classic gameplay styles.

Good. Sustained bad-faith player behavior should get no more (nor less) respect than bad-faith GM behavior.

Do you want me to answer the question, or respect your choice to bow out? I feel I've gotten a mixed message here. But the TL;DR of my point is: You claim a single, central, strong authority is the only shield against "chaos" in social groups. Yet real social groups exist without chaos that do...

But that isn't the only way to create party interdependence. 4e was--by far--the best edition yet made for actually inducing party interdependence, and it had many things you reject, while avoiding many things you claim are necessary. So, again, we're left with something that doesn't actually...

If the GM is guaranteed to occasionally act in bad faith, should we not prepare for that inevitability, rather than shrugging and saying, "What can we do?" Who is the person with the responsibility to keep the peace and adjudicate decisions in a married couple? Who is the person with the...

Genuinely: Why should we design a game with the expectation that characters will be kinda bad at most of the things they'll do, and only decent at (say) a quarter of things they do? That's not a particularly wise game design, I should think! Why should we accept this? Why should we not involve...

Hell, you barely even have that. At least in Gauntlet, it's always some kind of combat challenge so you're always contributing.

Oh, no I understood what you meant (I think, anyway). I was just expressing my position, because it seemed so at odds with the position you were describing (which isn't yours, I was already clear on that point). Yeah, if anyone thinks real Good can happen purely by happenstance...I have a...

But that wasn't what was said. What was said was that the GM decides what your alignment is. Which is a significant step beyond merely "the player's roleplaying".

Well I mean there are at least three reasons why it is neither basic nor uncontroversial. The GM can very easily be simply applying a ridiculous or illogical standard. I have seen this before. Folks who think you can only be "Good" if you bleed yourself dry for every unfortunate soul you meet...

I will not concede this. Not unless "most of the time" is so squishy it literally only means "anything that at least meets the bare minimum for plurality." Like that's the key thing here. I absolutely do think that professional designers deserve respect, and that there are a lot of people out...

Strange. At least for myself, I am quite the other way around. Being merely nice to someone doesn't make you good. To quote a certain carpenter's son, "And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that." Token acts of assistance, especially if...

I mean you literally said nobody can do better than the designers themselves. That means the published editions are the best they could possibly be--because everything published inherently outweighs anything done by people who aren't employed as designers. "Most of the time" is the fatal flaw...

Whether or not you are sold on it is not, IMO, the most relevant factor. Whether or not it is a feature that people expect of a game called "D&D" is a more relevant factor. Beyond that, though? I doubt I have much chance of swaying your position, but I think of it this way: Somewhere around...

This implies three things, none of which I consider to be true. Every edition of D&D has been designed perfectly correctly from the word go, so it isn't possible for anyone to improve upon what exists. People who get paid to design TTRPGs are necessarily more knowledgeable, skillful, and...

Except that's not what "archetypes" means in the 5e context. "Archetype", in the 5e context, means a branch within an "easily-identifyable [sic] class". So your "offer" here is, "Okay, here me out: We delete everything you're looking for, and replace it with something that has none of what...

For me, this is like saying that a Barbarian and a Fighter are thematically similar enough, just reflavor your Champion crits as "oh I was raging then." Like...I guess you can do that? But doing so makes it so "Barbarian" is literally nothing more than a nametag, which is deeply unsatisfying to...

Do you intend to address the issues that led Specialties to be abandoned in the first place? That is, the problem with them was that you hard-locked yourself into one and only one path and you did so at an extremely early point. But including a "build it yourself" Specialty functionally...