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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.

You have to assume the point of the mechanic is not to try and succeed at the challenge. The goal is to see what happens as a result of the character wanting/trying something, not to act as an agent of the character trying to get the thing (a thing very muddied in skill challenges, because they...

You've got it backwards. It's not that there's some central campaign following the licensing trail between industries, it's that a lot of individual people don't want anything to do with Rowling and react when she appears in their hobbies or media.

Players are bad at math. Team monster will roll many, many more attacks than team hero and have many many more bodies to distribute their health between. That, and frankly I think your delight in random negative outcomes is anomalous. Negative events are interesting when they make you play...

Skill challenges are better understood as a shared fiction generation exercise that allows for player contributions to be digested toward a given output, instead of a gameplay mechanism. The limited tactical space is the point; by not privileging any particular action declaration over any other...

I mostly see this particular fudging example as more evidence that critical hits are a bad general mechanic that is specifically targeted at making high variability things happen to players. They should be a fairly limited class feature, tied to whatever trait is providing PCs with protagonistic...

"Meta" is a complicated prefix for RPGs. Because it's used in both the "meta game" sense you explained above, but also metatextual or metafictional, to indicate an awareness of the game fiction as fiction. When I discuss the local meta game of Netrunner, I do not mean the same thing most people...

I generally agree, though I would say that magic makes overwhelming the DC without taking 10 much more likely (though climb may be a bad example there, as it's routinely overwhelmed by spider climb). I'd point out a separate feature of the mechanic (not necessarily relevant to sim), in that...

I'm more a modern roguelike guy, but sure. I just think tabletop environments with my friends and a dedicated person for content generation are better at it.

Oh god, I played a lot of Talisman back in my youth and heartily hope never to play any more ever again. That being said, I don't see a problem with this. I don't think the roleplaying would be especially good, but I mostly see it as the tool we use to get to those victory conditions. If...

I don't have an object swinging system off the top of my head, but I want to point out that I don't actually care if they perfectly fulfill a genre convention; I would rather have a player note there is a chandelier and decide not to swing on it, because that would be an ineffective move than...

This is always my problem, whenever the "crazy example" comes up, it just reads as a clear design prompt to me. Does your game not have improvised weapon and object interaction rules? That feels pretty easy to resolve without particularly complicated systems. See also "swinging from chandeliers."

This is a crude approach in an already terrible context that will only make things worse, but I could see an argument for wanting to limit de minimis more broadly. I don't think the business model that Temu built entirely off the back of it is particularly good for the world or worth...

Precisely. I think there is unique value to the TTRPG form that doesn't come solely at the expense of all the other stuff.

The ur-example is the 3e climbing rules. They're pretty action complete. I wouldn't overindex on "knowing the outcome" here though. Randomness in resolution, hidden elements on the board state, baffling actions by other parties and so forth could lead to undesired or unaccounted for outcome, all...

I really don't think that's necessary, especially once you add some expected genre/structure constraints and zoom out the abstraction a little. More structurally though, I think you could absolutely have an RPG with very constrained actions as long as you have unbounded play time, player set...

To calculate the most efficient DPR trade-off once you've determined the enemy's AC, especially if you're using and extra stuff that adds on modifiers, like Shock Trooper. It's not a wild idea, though a "spreadsheet" is a bit of hyperbole for what was mostly a set of benchmarks. I definitely had...

I think that's more dogma than fact, but more importantly I think directionally wrong for design. Starting from an assumption that your game is necessarily incomplete and will be subject to adhoc rules design later encourages bad design thinking. I don't think we fundamentally disagree here, I...

I am not totally sure what point about spells you're referring to, I think I'm just missing the post looking back, but I'm not sure my point about negotiation should be bundled broadly into that discussion. I think negotiation is an unpleasant gameplay experience that eats up a lot of design...

I think there's an issue of timing at least. The sort of clarification as fictional creation you're talking about happens before action declaration and certainly not as part of resolution. I think there's also a question of contingency, though the GM closing to use a random table does complicate...