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@TwoSix explained it pretty well. It's a mistake to focus on a given die roll; I don't care if I succeed on a climb check, but if my character's goal is getting into that fortified zoo to rescue an awakened giraffe, what is the best set of actions I can declare to get that result? Ideally, the...

That puts me in kind of a different Alexandrian article. 3e's mistake was failure to extrapolate far enough above that well defined baseline, but the ultimate lesson seems to have been "wow we wasted a lot of time making that all make sense." I want more design cycles calibrating jump checks...

I've argued elsewhere before that spells are a better basic interaction game than skills. Ideally, skills would just be a defaulting mechanism you'd call on when players aren't using class abilities to interact with the world, either because they don't see the situation as a meaningful problem...

You're mixing up "resolution" and "gameplay" here. Gameplay is leveraging the stuff you have to get the thing you want. The gameplay in liar's dice, for example, is in gauging the likely distribution, considering the space lost by each raised bet, trying to raise your opponent to an untenable...

It's funny to see skills as more damaging than "spells that let you skip the problem" a criticism I also felt was entirely off-base. You're right that at least has a resource management component, but like combat the real underlying resource should still be action economy. There's space for a...

That's treading dangerously close to the 4e skill challenge synthesis. Ideally, those numbers aren't just a pacing mechanism, but a gameplay mechanism; they provide a set of abilities that players can leverage against the setting to get the outcomes they want. I want to be inside that castle, I...

Sure would help if we actually had tasks appropriate to each DC laid out, so we'd know exactly how competent a rogue is supposed to be....and putting down my "everything since the 3.x era skill system has been backsliding" drum, more broadly anything that can be resolved in a single skill check...

I've found your points insightful in the past, but I don't think you're doing your best work here. You're trying to make a call to "Improv" and "Yes, and" as established, clear rules we all understand and that's just not the case. Improv games are a diverse field taught in a grand variety of...

Surges were probably the biggest branding mistake 4e made. Call it "healing tolerance" and write out "25% of their hit point total" each time and they'd be much better understood. There's arguments to be had over whether players should generally go into each encounter at full HP or not...

Far too much to hope we'll reinvent in a mere 10 more years.

The original sin is the link between ability scores and accuracy. As long as that persists (and defenses scale at all) it's always going to be optimal to maximize that number. Ability scores can't be an interesting flavor choice if they're also the value that determines if your action was wasted...

It's they/them pronouns for Erika Ishii, the performer, and then the character is she/her. Everyone on WBN has talked quite a bit about inhabiting "writer brain" as well as "actor brain" and sometimes separately "character brain," so this kind of exploration of character is absolutely something...

Precisely. The strong version of that point is that mechanisms of good OC play are meta-textual to the rules, which I'm not totally sure I believe, but I haven't actually seen mechanisms that achieve the desired results without breaking some other part of the experience. I have a theory that...

For sure it is. I think the big thing that makes it look any different there is just the caliber of performers. I think they're absolutely playing in the space you call out in your earlier example with our two estranged brothers, it's just that the boundaries of that space are much bigger, due...

My post is a reading of the conflict, not a disputation of @innerdude's report. Obviously, I have no special insight into either party. Unless you're describing a game that accretes progression strictly to the player but not the character I'm not sure that actually much matters. It would be...

I think that reads a lot more like "I don't like the character motivations my player picked, they don't produce a loop I'm interested in." The thing I was pointing out is that any game with progression will always encourage players to assign "get better stuff/at stuff" as a character motivation...

I think it's worth drilling in on this, because I think it's generally too reductive to cut the player motivation down to just "get better stuff." Stuff, progression, all that is nearly always in service to other goals. Personal power is directly correlated with agency; better stuff is very...

We'd have to fight about a definition of "agency" again to settle that question. "Tourism" carries a strong implication players don't have any; regardless of their prompts/actions they'd get the same exposition.

Tiny little thing I've spotted, the Esper/Fighter first feat provides proficiency in "Intuition" which I'm pretty sure is meant to be Insight. Very exciting though, this has hit at exactly the time I have characters considering mixed class builds.

I don't want to touch the Nar point, but I'm unpersuaded this is a necessary feature of a Gamist approach. I think it's perfectly possible to finesse either or both the mechanics or characterization to align the incentives of a player with the incentives of their character, thus that both make...