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No, I was talking about hit points. Fixed or random, if an amount of damage is a small enough percentage of your opponent's total HP, the coolness of your move won't mean diddly to your opponent. Heck, an overwhelmed GM, who has too many things to keep track of, can record 90% damage to an NPC...

Reading the Hit Points Are a Great Mechanic thread, I'm struck by one of the simplest implications of the mechanism: you either have hit points, or you don't. You're alive or dead. Some games don't buy into this dichotomy, introducing stages of injury, and that's when the "death spiral"...

I imagine this is what the quartermaster would scoop into their grubby little chow bowls/helmets from the back of a wagon. I know most of my army chow was delivered with wheels. But yeah, if you're stuck on the front line, bringing a few pounds of muesli wouldn't hurt.

Aw, c'mon! I'm waiting to see how many pumpkin spice ingredients are in my first round of IRON DM.

Well, I can solve your problem in three letters then: NPC. They follow GM rules, not player rules. But black and white rules are boring. What about the fluff? Why does this mage want to wear armor? It's heavy and noisy. Armor is for the simpletons who think getting close to swords is a...

I wonder where these unrealistic assumptions come from . . .

I'd say it's a good call, letting ENWorld do the localized timestamping for this, but sometimes the forum thinks I post in the future. (Only by a minute or so.)

This . . . looks like a typo. But it's probably not. . . . is a wagon. Fortunately for GMs, wagons don't roll everywhere!

The PCs can decide, sure. But it's more interesting to me if I'm finding something that I haven't invented.

It doesn't even have to be choices. Just provide interest. This is what I gathered from Numenera: the goal of the game is to learn, explore, or discover. Find new landmarks and artifacts, and delve into their secrets. You could call that a choice - investigate or not? - but the interest is...

There's a flipside to that. Getting a crit on the enemy just to realize that the enemy didn't notice is a bit of a buzzkill.

Pretty much. I bet someone could abstract it out, like for a game theory course, but I doubt it would hit the points that OP wants.

If I'm reading you right, Modos RPG is set up to do this. The rules are modular and catalogued, so any variant has its own subset of new and/or modified rules. Grab a free copy from DTRPG - the catalog is in the back. D&D 6 seems to be taking a stab at this with its "glossary" of rules, but...

Ah. And it had WAR, who's awesome.

I'll get back to you after I figure out how "D&D PbtA" works.

Wasn't it just D&D 3 with a Combat Maneuver Bonus?

Magitech for me. I like my fantasy primitive. Or at least pre-industrial. Ah, the lovely smell of the chamber pots in the morning...

Long journeys? You should act a little like a reality show producer, and ask the characters how they feel about each other or something that's happened. Bring up a character's background, and they can talk it out as they walk or against the backdrop of another encounter. Failing that, see Pee...

I'll compete!