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If you start pulling on the consistency thread, you'll find proponents willing to do away with just about any PC exceptionalism.

This seems like a pretty standard 4eism to me, and a general extension of the idea that monster and NPC stats exist entirely to govern their interaction with PCs during combat. The game simply doesn't believe it's any concern of the rules precisely how you define the "no longer relevant to...

All the conflict here is because everyone seems to think the answer to that question is obvious. I personally think that's a huge design expense you need to be buying a lot with, the whole minion discussion is predicated on it being pretty cheap.

Yeah, I'm not saying the player's should determine which strategy is best, I'm saying there needs to be multiple strategies a player can discriminate between. And that can be undermined in a few different ways: if the approach does not influence resolution, if there's no advantage to any...

I'm not sure this can matter at the level of an individual action declaration, it's probably easier to zoom out to "get into the locked vault" as an objective. There should be a meaningful difference between "I bribe the guard," "I impersonate the bank manager," "I smash any door in my way" and...

Oh, that was just 3.5 RAW. Here's the spell: And here's the general rules on illumination: Shadowy illumination is less dark than darkness.

No, I'm saying the player's decision making being the most significant factor in whether or not they achieve their goals is definitional to agency.

It doesn't necessarily, but it's really easy to overwhelm participant's input with randomness, either by outright setting odds too low, or calling for iterated rolls. If the rolling has as much or more influence on the outcome than the player's decision, their agency is clearly compromised.

I'm firmly in the "for effect" camp, but I want to point out that "rolling" is doing a lot of conceptual work here. My preferred state of affairs is much more that players declare a set of actions as a strategy to achieve their intent; the endpoint shouldn't be to get to one or more rolls, but...

The formatting suggests that selecting a Cutting Omens maneuver is also an option when you crit, there's nothing that pulls you out of the list implied by the first feature. Taking out the context, you end up with: It's not immediately clear the first two options are the bonus on crit, and the...

Nice! Just a small formatting thing, the warcaster crit bonuses probably should be indented once to differentiate them from the maneuver below.

Same, I'm a big fan of Melissa Scott broadly and that's been a blind spot I just haven't gotten around to correcting.

I've described the primary fantasy at the core of D&D before as "violence can be sanctified and solve problems." It is not only okay to take a sword up against an enemy, but by doing so you will actively make the world a better place and achieve your goals. I would put minions in the same...

I don't is the thing! I either find a base map and maybe add assets if I'm doing a digital map for an encounter, or I hand draw a rough map. I do the later more often if I'm planning a large connected area out like a dungeon, given how much more work goes into doing that digitally, even with...

Right, we're leaving out steps. The proposed structure is creative agenda->design goal->mechanic. Pointing out a mechanic doesn't serve an agenda is pointless (in no small part because RPGs still struggle with successful implementation all the time); what was the design goal the mechanic tried...

I've been consistently frustrated with how difficult it is to go from a low detail to a highly detailed map cleanly. Ideally, I'd like a comfortable way to expand from my low-res, drawing with markers on a grid or hex paper (or digital equivalent) to a more detailed map with light structures and...

I'm becoming more empathetic to the stance we should avoid labeling mechanics with agendas. They end up serving as synecdoches for the design goals they try to implement, which might be aimed at an agenda. I'm not sure they can have any real valence in isolation. The whole understanding of...

I'm not suggesting those things are equivalent. Personally, I'm perfectly happy with the "fighters can just wade through lava" position, because a consistently applied, knowable mechanic that lets me draw conclusions about the world is significantly more important than modeling real world...

Is this not the whole sim point? The mechanics are a concrete representation of something that can be understood, and there is no "correct kind of experience." Or at least, the fixed nature of the mechanics is a design constraint; putting down stats for a housecat absolutely does define the...

To some degree, isn't this a good problem to have? Seeing aside scry and fry, I think it's probably for the best that the world have a bias toward small, flexible and highly powered teams over large military hierarchies to enable the whole adventuring premise in the first place.