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Exactly!

It’s typically set in Victorian England or a fictional setting heavily inspired by Victorian England. Of course it’s dystopian.

You mean 1974?

Solarpunk is probably the most genuinely punk of the punkpunks since cyberpunk. Punk doesn’t mean pessimistic, it means anti-authoritarian and critical of mainstream society. Solarpunk is absolutely that, and its optimism is a part of what makes it punk, because mainstream society is giving into...

Lord of the Rings is one very specific work of fiction; steampunk is an entire genre. You might as well say that Aquaman is closer to Southern Gothic than it is to The Little Mermaid. It’s just a meaningless comparison.

We’ve been there for many years. Most “punkpunk” subgenres really have nothing to do with punk, other than the fact that they developed out of cyberpunk, which was called that because it was, in fact, punk. Some punkpunk works are genuinely punk of course, but mostly the term gets applied purely...

A bit of a tangent here, but I would argue there’s a reverse-Clarke’s Law going on with D&D’s magic. It is sufficiently understood so as to be indistinguishable from technology. Eberron is the only setting that really delves into the implications of how systematic, reliable, and reproducible...

Not all speculative fiction involving anachronistic technologies in historical periods is steampunk. Steampunk pretty specifically employs steam power and sometimes clockwork (though that can arguably blur the line into cogpunk) to introduce such anachronistic technology, usually to Victorian...

Very true! The story wasn’t really about how to make a fun and memorable challenge using ostensibly weak monsters, it was about reminiscing about a fun and memorable challenge the teller once had against ostensibly weak monsters. I also think Tucker’s success would be hard to imitate, not only...

Adding to this interpretation, if I were to assume the Tucker’s Kobolds story is both true and a mostly-accurate recounting of the events, and try to guess at Tucker’s rationale for choosing to make Kobolds the most dangerous thing in his dungeon, beyond it just being a memorable thing about his...

Well, prefacing this by reiterating that the story is very much an inkblot test that people are going to take away whatever they want to take away from it… My interpretation was that this was a specific choice Tucker made to try to make his game stand out. Level 10 fire demons being difficult...

From what I remember, they had significantly better armor than kobolds normally do, they used a lot of oil, and they used Kobold-sized access tunnels to get around and beat the PCs to wherever they were going. We can’t know for sure if the kobolds movements within these tunnels was fiat-based or...

Like I said, I recognize there’s no world in which WotC would take the approach I’m describing. This is very much not true. Anchoring is a very real, very impactful psychological effect. For an easy example of it in action, consider the incredibly unpopular exhaustion penalty in the World of...

Might I suggest looking into Mystic Arts’ recent(ish) video on hobgoblins? Obviously hobgoblins should play differently than kobolds, but Daði’s basic premise of using modular design to make a wide variety of CRs for creatures of a single type could be very useful in creating a Tucker’s kobolds...

Yes, very much so. I suppose you could adjust the math in the Dark Sun monster manual to account for this generally lower caster power level (though personally I don’t think it would be necessary to), so long as players feel like preserving requires them to limit themselves vs how they’re used...

Likewise, I get where you’re coming from, but I think part of what makes for a good game is adversity. There’s something lost if we insist on trying to insure everything is “fun” in isolation rather than trying to create ups and downs. That said, I do appreciate that this particular desire of...

Well I’m not trying to say to pass the buck to individual preservers. I am saying doing the work of preserving should feel hard, and in the immediate term, thankless. Especially if you’re doing it as a lone individual. A few plucky preservers planting trees won’t cut it, they’ve got to rally...

I don’t know that it would be, but I’d rather the design actually work the way some folks misremember it instead of counting on faulty memory to make people think it worked that way 20 years from now. That would be interesting

And, like, maybe this is me putting too much on the DM, but my philosophy is that the DM’s job is to give the players the opportunity to become such legendary heroes. Taking the right path should be hard, but it should be possible, and it should feel rewarding in the long run even if it’s tough...

That’s not my intent. My intent is to say that doing the right thing is hard, and needs to be done anyway. I mean, fair. My take is pretty bleak, and it’s understandable if it doesn’t appeal to many.