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Yes, I made this point upthread. 4e is similar. But then Ready isn't an action in itself; and it has to be described as something you do in lieu of taking an action.

A RPG doesn't have to explain the laws of biology or physics to not have "edge cases". Of RPGs I'm familiar with, I don't think Agon 2e or Prince Valiant have edge cases in the way that D&D does.

I haven't changed my mind on this over the past month. The Doom Pool doesn't involve manipulating anyone. To elaborate: In classic D&D (Gygax & Arneson; AD&D; B/X) the fundamental job of the GM is to (i) draw a dungeon map, then (ii) key that map (with monsters, traps/tricks, and treasure)...

I think railroading is primarily about the trajectory of play: What scenes are framed? And what is at stake in them? Who decides what happens next? A GM who requires 3 natural 20 rolls in a row to (say) disarm the Balrog might be making a bad decision as GM - it might just be better to say that...

Doesn't it? Ready says: You take the Ready action to wait for a particular circumstance before you act. To do so, you take this action on your turn, which lets you act by taking a Reaction before the start of your next turn. First, you decide what perceivable circumstance will trigger your...

I think this very much depends on the RPG in question. D&D, increasingly over the past 25 years but going all the way back to its origins if one thinks about spell/magic item interactions, approaches action resolution by reference to all sorts of intricate individual components that must be...

I'm not sure "railroading" applies outside of the context of a game where one participant - the GM - plays an important role in choosing what happens next. But anyway, I don't see how M:tG is a "total railroad". Each player gets to make their choices within the rules, and the state of the game...

I don't know the details of the Modiphius systems. But I am pretty familiar with the Doom Pool in Marvel Heroic RP. One thing it does is to serve the same function as player-side plot points: to manipulate resolution dice pools. But it can also be used to affect various aspects of a scene -...

Are these any worse than in other editions? Even 4e, which was at the tighter end, had some uncertainties in its rules (eg what happens when a character becomes dazed partway through their turn? My group first ran it that a character got to keep their full action economy from the start of their...

Then they're called out. That doesn't make them, per se, coercion. For instance, and to choose a simple example: suppose that I discover the GM is fudging, I might call it out. This doesn't mean that the GM is, or has been, coercing me.

Do they? or do they just manipulate events, player responses, etc? I've played in railroading games where there was no coercion, but plenty of manipulation.

Not all manipulation is coercion. In the absence of a threat, I don't see how there can be coercion. And if you don't realise there's a threat, then you won't change your behaviour and hence won't be coerced. (This happened to me once in a rather charged interaction with police that I had in a...

As I've posted, I'm not that familiar with D&D 5e. But I think you're probably exaggerating the issues with its rules a little bit.

The issue for me is not just about it being life-threatening. It's (i) that it is typically not debilitating, and (ii) even if you drop to zero or fewer hp, it's often likely that you'll recover to full hit points just by resting. I think (i) and (ii) put pretty significant constraints around...

The thing is, writing rules that are clear and precise is hard. Legislative drafters have years of technical training, comprehensive guidance manuals, a long tradition to draw upon, and still interpretive questions arise in relation to legislation all the time. It's not realistic, in my view...

I'm not sure how this relates to the issue of coercion.

Right. Ready is characterised as an action to give it a place in the rules for taking turns and taking actions on turns. But it is also a gloss/rider/supplement - it qualifies another action, which is the one that (typically) is taken when the trigger occurs or that (if a spell is readied) is...

My way of thinking about damage on a miss is that the character is so relentless and implacable that they always set back any foe they choose to attack. The roll to hit is just to determine how much they set back this foe on this occasion.

To me, this seems to be an over-reification of the action economy and turn-by-turn framework. To me, it makes more sense to assume that casting a spell always involves conjuring up and then releasing its energy. But in the typical case, where the caster has already identified their target and...

Right. I would (tentatively, given my limited knowledge of 5e) go even one step further: all the stuff about casting the spell now while holding the energy seems to establish an express contrast with changing the casting time to 1 Reaction. Unlike Shield, where the caster conjures up the magical...