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Obviously a matter of taste and thus legitimate. Personally, my own feeling is if the system doesn't have at least a fair amount of engagement, I might as well be doing freeform roleplaying and not bother with a game system.

I think its fundamentally a fool's errand to really try and build a game for both players with high engagement and low engagement. You can have a degree of variance, but I've not seen a case where trying that didn't create problems (in 13th Age, for example, it ends up walling off concepts into...

Yeah, that's what I was talking about when saying that its unsurprising that when playing a game with character toggles designed to be used to make tactical choices in combat, if you can't be bothered to learn how to use those toggles, you're unlikely to get a good experience. I mean, to be...

I think that's a separate issue, but as it is.

Not a good policy in general IMO, but again, if the players know you do it in general, its not playing bait and switch. No. A lot of people do illusionism thinking it'll be "better" for the game. The difference is whether the players buy into it (to make it clear, I'm talking in general...

Ironically, I think if you're up-front about using illusionism with your gaming group, that's fine; then they can either tell you that's not what they want to happen or take a walk or whatever upfront, too. But a lot of GMs don't want to, well, break the illusion, and want to act like they're...

There can be some minor cases here where if you know your players right a bit of no-foul slight-of-hand is okay--but you'd better know them well (and by that I mean better than I suspect most GMs do), because illusionism is one of those things that if people care about it at all, one failed...

A lot of it depends on how much the players are committed to the adventure-at-hand in the first place. I've had campaigns that were mostly on rails, everyone knew they were mostly on rails, and side gigs were considered by everyone a random luxury that shouldn't take up too much time. I've had...

It depends heavily on the game. Its abundantly clear that 13th Age strikes are a mix of trauma and something else (because of some opponents doing miss damage). On the other hand, all evidence I'd have is to do damage in Eclipse Phase (and most other BRP derived and adjacent games) actual...

I don't think some kinds of stretch goals are a great evil, if you keep them down to a dull roar and only go for digital form. Even if it takes a while, if it doesn't hold up the main product, that's okay; the stretch goals for Part Time Gods 2e took a while to drop, but that wasn't a big deal...

Me too.

The problem is that they don't seem to find any other stakes as important as character survival, so its not clear even if every combat had attached stakes that it'd matter. As best I can tell, their character's loss in combat would have to directly contribute to a major campaign loss before it...

I don't think its from being a Forever GM; I'm a Forever GM, but as you might gather, I'm as or more attached to the context and events going on than the character itself. If I'm in a game where there's a significant chance of death and I'm in a battle to save the town and I lose my character...

I was thinking that myself, but wanted to avoid going there because a lot of people consider pawn/token play a degenerate play-style in RPGs (it absolutely wasn't considered such at one time, but a lot of water has gone under the bridge there) and the poster seemed to have some attachment to...

Yeah. You sometimes get problems with printing and/or shipping in physical products anyway, but the more physical add-ons that are with the project, the more likely this is to happen (and gods know that's probably many times more true now), and I've heard too many horror stories of it happening...

A lot of investigative horror games, honestly. In the majority of them there's no question that combat is frequently a failure state, and they want you to be aware of that. (This is in contrast to action-horror and survival-horror which have different dynamics). Your choice, but I'm about...

Eh, to be fair, that's only true if combat or other high-risk activities are a focus of the game. That's common, but not universal. For a few its just a way of saying "You don't want to get in combat more often than events force you to." Are you still taking that poster at all seriously?

Or the most thoroughly depressing. But in any case, that'st he point: losing those matters. But again, this is only an issue if the only value--or at least the biggest one--is the character's life.

I'll just note again I never saw that much time taken in PF2e, and I played two campaigns up to 20th level (including one with hybrid characters who are "busier" than normal ones) so there's go to be something more to it than that.

If I'm playing RuneQuest and lose the character I'm playing, its not the only one I'll ever have. It may be a character I've invested in, but going into a campaign where death was on the table meant that character was always going to be, given the life of an adventurer, ephemeral. Losing the...