Search results

I personally would default to nothing but humans. I don’t find the other heritages or races to be all that interesting, really. They seem more like archetypes than anything. Nothing that can’t really be accomplished with cultural differences. But other people feel differently. So I don’t...

Yes, it may be. But what I've seen is that most often, it's not. Many folks here and many I've discussed with and played with create their own worlds which are not really significantly different from bog-standard D&D except they've eliminated choices that they don't enjoy. No drow, tieflings...

One other point regarding the recent discussion of settings. One of my pet peeves is "original settings" that are nothing more than a different map, deities with different names, and then a list of options that have been removed because the GM doesn't like them. Are some original settings...

I'm talking about all of it. But even if we limit it to just play, I still have a hard time believing that players make more decisions than the DM. I mean... do you typically not use multiple enemies in combat? More NPCs is more decisions. Although individual NPCs don't make as many decisions as...

Yeah, I won’t fully detail a setting without involving the players, and any game I GM will have group character creation. I want collaboration on both.

I would think it’s trivially obvious that the GM makes more decisions than the players. I mean… you’re running an entire world. Each player is running an individual character. I absolutely make more decisions than my players when I run D&D. And I don’t even prep heavily!

Which of the ways that you've designed and made decisions about. The den that you decided exists and will decide what it contains. The ogre you decided exists and decided its behavior. The potion you decided to give them and the obstacle you designed requiring the use of a jump potion. And...

Yeah, we went over so many iterations that could easily get the cook and door scenario to work. What I’ve learned is that if someone is dead set on a conclusion, they’ll ignore or dismiss any argument or evidence to the contrary. Yeah, it’s “nonsensical” only if you start with the...

Oh, I didn’t take offense. I don’t get offended by what’s said on these boards. That doesn’t mean I don’t notice when someone posts some passive aggressive comment.

Nope.

That’s some sweet passive aggression.

Yeah, I don't really follow that. It reads to me as "this one's okay because it closely aligns to my thinking, this one is not because it does not." Okay, fair enough. I'm surprised to hear that given how defensive you tend to be, but I'll keep that in mind! Well, this depends, right? I...

It may be. But it’s also the extreme. People will have different thresholds of what is tolerable before we get to the extreme where we might all agree there’s a problem. Like, for me, I expect my tolerance for the amount of GM authority would be exceeded way before yours. Now, my threshold for...

Isekai is a sub-genre of anime and manga about a character getting transported to a different world. It’s popular in Japan, but can be used to describe works that predate the term… like the John Carter Mars stories, A Connecticut Yankee, the D&D cartoon, and plenty of others. It’s very much...

I don’t think it’s out of the ballpark to interpret the below and the tangent it brought about exactly as @pemerton did. I’d say his take was spot on. I have played plenty of football (whichever kind you prefer) without a ref, and the games I was in never devolved into arguing about offsides.

You know… I got moderated for making assumptions about other people’s motives. No one has ragged on you. You aren’t trad gaming.

Maybe. It depends on so many factors that we could each just come up with scenarios to serve as examples. But ultimately, it’s something that may happen… and to he honest, it’s probably a slightly less extreme version that would crop up. It doesn’t have to be a red dragon.

Seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to me. It’s a mistake, they happen. Just adjust going forward. Following a mistake as a precedent just seems foolish.

While I agree with you that a discussion during the game is generally fine, I don’t think that in a case where it may make sense to make a ruling and then move on, that you can’t change your mind afterwards. There’s no reason to retcon anything… just, going forward you follow the new ruling.

This seems to assume no responsibility on the players’ part. If PCs encounter and are killed by a red dragon at level 1, it’s certainly possible that the GM is being an a-hole, as you put it. But it could also happen because of poor decisions by the players. Enforce? No, probably not… but...