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No, I believe the design task is to set a series of rules that can as completely as possible adjudicate any player proposal, using knowable, player facing rules. That most systems fail at this is not an indictment of the goal. Obviously, some abstraction is necessary, but you can get pretty far...

I worry whenever "challenge" gets used this way. There's nothing challenging about a die roll; you don't demonstrate more or less skill by rolling a 5 or a 15. The challenge is the problem (getting the heirloom off the mantle or whatever) and all of the rolls and action declarations are tools to...

I think that's slightly reductive, that's also part of a set of principled restrictions on the GM's power, and it's part of the board state players make moves on. There's more going on than just moving some imagination from prep to at the table.

Oh I couldn't disagree more. The important part is the open ended nature of goal setting, not undefined interaction. A robust set of rules, if anything, makes it clear what players can achieve with each action and in the rare cases an activity outside then comes up, gives the GM more to model a...

This has always just looked like incomplete design to me. Surely you could just list the time it takes to perform the action and what failure/success look like? Damaging the door and/or leaving traces are modifiers, making it easier or harder to achieve, and acting silently is clearly a general...

Right, but mostly we seem to design discussion as a rhetorical proxy for arguing our baseline assumptions should be normative of TTRPGs as a whole. Has anyone actually gotten anywhere laying out their design parameters ahead of time, and then along for feedback within that framework exclusively? :p

Hardly news to you, but I've been banging on for a decade now that skill challenges are a terrible game. Great narrative pacing mechanism, terrible gameplay. Same issue with fail forward mechanism manifested differently; they take situations that have the potential for strategic decision making...

I'm doing no such thing. I'm pointing out a consequence of fail forward design, a thing it cannot do, not offering advice on how a game featuring it should be played. If you don't care about evaluating the quality of the players decisions, it does not matter. Getting into what "winning" is in...

We're going around in circles and I think I'm not explaining myself well. My whole point is that fail forward design structure can render player decision making less impactful; you're trading player ability to learn about and manipulate the situation for a more procedurally dynamic situation...

That's precisely the problem though; I want the player to force events to unfold in a desired way. If the game can always continue from some other there, then there was no point in picking a specific here as preferable. I get this, but I'm saying it undervalues the player's choices; I want...

You know, I think part of my issue might simply be the number of characters. I do a lot better with slice of life when the perspective is constrained to a limited few, and they aren't dealing with distant or unrelated events. It's certainly not that I mind system exploration or even setting...

I'll reconsider it! I'd pushed it off the list for the portal fantasy reasons listed above.

I immediately love this conceptually. Differentiated spellcasting is my favorite underused space in D&D, I would absolutely love all the classes to be working with different resource systems and different mechanical undercarriages. I have mixed feelings on this, but I struggle with a spot for...

I really wanted to like the Wandering Inn more, but it's a bit too meandering for me. It does that thing where the characters feel like they're just stirred around together to see what comes out, when I really need a bit more plot.

Amusingly, I have precisely the opposite problem. I'll take rules for days, but I despise a portal frame narrative. Either the whole experience becomes more artificial, feels like a lazy exposition device, or it feels like it's wasting my time until the character finally becomes sufficiently...

Left to my druthers, I would go a step further and say "you can't have a game" at all, but that's unnecessarily hostile in this space, and you could find people even in board games who would disagree. I just think that's a facile and limited way to look at RPGs specifically; I've argued before...

I'm leery of talk of puzzles and solutions when it comes to describing gameplay, but that's broadly right. I'm now just reflexively braced for "and that works for dungeon crawling but not for...." that always comes next.

See, this is a great summation of the ongoing fight about language. That's a narrativist summation of what's happening; I'd propose the GM is an attempt to generate and report on a fictional setting that players can interact with via mechanical mediation. The GM is an imperfect technology for...

Right, I don't really think that's a bad thing, so much as the earseeker was a stupid escalation that led to weird results. Fundamentally, I want players to come up with procedures to resolve problems as safely as possible. My ideal state as a GM is reluctantly acknowledging the player has...

I think mine fall somewhere between James Bond films and heist stories. A big problem presented upfront to a recurring cast of characters that occasionally cycle in and out, who then build a plan applying their expertise to solve it, either returning to the status quo, or discovering a bigger...