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Better gas mileage?

I'm right here. How does that go? There are dozens of us? :)

The text is referencing a newly announced Taylor Swift album.

Plus, even at his lowest, Gollum's goals were much smaller in scope compared to what Gandalf or Galadriel would have done.

Species as class alone doesn't get you that. But neither does saying "elves can be about class". It's the start of worldbuilding, not the end. Species as class does give you some constraints which make elves are meaningfully different than humans. It's a good point of departure for species which...

I think OpenD6 fits. It is under the OGL (1.0) and has exploding dice for the wild die at least. (Maybe others? Been a while since I played). See page 55 of the pdf, the section with wild die.

People are willing to take extreme levels of risk. The K2 climbers, the BASE jumpers, and so on. I bet you'd find some.

Imo species-as-class gets pretty close to what I want out of species that feel distinctly different while maintaining some degree of balance.

Which is the key difference, in your mind? If the DM ran a skill challenge but didn't tell them the mechanics, would that also reduce DM control in an appropriate way? What if they told the players the DCs for various tasks, but the players still chose their route to infiltrate? (I know you...

I don't think anyone is claiming real causality. The same holds for player action -- your declaration of attacking an orc does not cause an orc to be damaged, nor does it cause you to roll the dice. You could choose not to. But you can't forgo doing so and be considered to be playing the game...

Suppose the GM makes a ruling that clearly violates causality. What happens to the game? Ime it falls apart because the GM can no longer be trusted in the role of neutral arbiter. The Magic Circle is broken, the game suspended. Concretely this manifests as people leaving the table.

In some cases those are covered by the double jeopardy principle. In others, the world. For example, why does the guard patrol change? If the GM decides that arbitrarily to force another roll, that is poor DMing. If the guards change every hour and that time has come, then it follows from the...

The post I was quoting was about resolving obstacles, not generating them. When I am resolving obstacles, I do so as an observer--my narration is constrained by the state of the game world and the rules of the game. When I generate new obstacles I am participating in a more obvious way. But in...

I think there are rules at play in how I assess the fictional state. If the players say they want to sneak across the grounds, I set the DC at 10, and they roll high enough, then I can't decide that they have not made their way across the grounds. Likewise if in their infiltration they take a...

It's not about what I, the GM, feel. It's about how what fictional state has been reached given the results of individual action declarations. It doesn't matter how I feel about it.

I don't think that's true. I never decide when a venture has succeeded based on adding up the number of overall successes. It is based on the fiction. With the night infiltration, success is "the players actions result in a fictional game state such that they are in the keep and the alarm has...

Yeah. Think especially of assassination missions, which play out very differently given our knowledge of hp.

I agree that constraints are important for creativity. I don't think it follows that all constraints are good, though. They will; but they will treat the environment less faithfully and less realistically than they would have otherwise. If you're doing skills one by one, each outcome determines...

I see what you're getting at; I can imagine in the correctly tuned scenario it could work. But I don't think you are characterizing other approaches correctly when you say they are pure GM fiat. How is setting a diplomacy DC of 10 different than setting a skill challenge with 3 successes needed...

I wouldn't say all further attempts fail, but absent significant changes to the situation, then yes. I'd spend a bit longer setting the scene prior to the roll: "Ok player A, you are appealing to his better nature. Are the rest of you saying anything?" And then player B or player C could...