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The most typical way of understanding coercion is in terms of a proposal - by the person doing the coercion - to make the other person's situation worse off, relative to some reasonable baseline, unless the coerced person takes some action that they otherwise wouldn't take. A GM who says "I've...

So this changes the Casting Time entry for the spell. Unlike Ready, which doesn't do that.

I think it would be clearer to say that it appears on a list of the game's main actions. And the reason for classifying it as an action is to incorporate it into the action economy and turn-taking framework. Just as 3E and 4e did. But this doesn't settle all the issues of rules interactions. I...

These are good posts. the D&D rules simply aren't drafted with sufficient precision to support the intricacate readings that some posters/RPGers are attempting. Ready began its life in 3E, as a Standard Action (PHB p 128) that is a "Special Initiative Action" (PHB p 133). It "lets you prepare...

Yeah, I'm one of those who disagree! I think in a lot of RPGing there is winning, similarly to how in a lot of other cooperative games (eg Forbidden Island) there is winning. Winning requires a degree of structure/constraint around how the play of the game unfolds. But, as per my post just...

Is it the GM who decides what the players (via their PCs) find? In that case, this seems to be looking to the GM's ideas to provide all that is interesting.

This raises the question, do the rules of play include the GM draws and keys a map, and then sticks to that as part of the core of scene-framing and action resolution? In some RPGing, the answer is yes. In some, it is no. I think it causes confusion to discuss and analyse all RPG play as if the...

I don't know the Dragonbane RPG, but have done this sort of play a reasonable amount. Most successfully, I've played quite a bit of two-person Burning Wheel, some with a single GM/single player arrangement, and some with the two of us playing and GMing simultaneously (in this latter case, each...

Then you have a problem: the GM wants to play The Catacombs of Lusmanora, and the players (apparently) don't. Suppose one person wants to play chess and the other backgammon: there's going to have to be a conversation to get on the same page. It looks like the same thing applies here.

Why wouldn't you just start the game with the PCs at the entrance to the catacombs?

Yes, Gygax is very clear about this in his DMG. In D&D, organ-puncturing or bone-shattering blows seem to generally (not universally) excluded by the fact that recovery is so easy.

I'd be way off the hit point bus at this point. But if I'm on that bus, then I'm following Gygax's advice on how to narrate hp loss.

But why would anyone narrate that hit as a narrow miss?

I think the idea of magically talking to a door with a face - most often I think this would be on a handle/knocker? - is kinda cool. Roughly carving a face into a door so that it can talk, on the other hand, seems less cool. And either way, I don't think Speak with Dead is the right spell...

This does give rise to the question, why does the game have those rules at all?

You could adopt the approach taken in Gygax's DMG, of narrating differently for high hp PCs (and NPCs) compared to most monsters.

This isn't how I've read @zarionofarabel's posts. After all, those posts have referenced (among other RPGs) Mouse Guard and Burning Wheel, neither of which is well-known for pawn stance play! To me, it seems that the objection is to extended, tactical combat resolution where (i) all that the...

I don't know which people you are saying do this. It's not something that I've experienced. I posted links to examples upthread - not from D&D play, but from Torchbearer 2e - that provide examples:

I don't follow why risk has to equate to risk of death. What about other sorts of risk that inhere in physical altercation - eg being injured, or blinded, or maimed, or . . .? As my posts have indicated, I also think that there can be tension-generating risks that are not inherent but rather...

But we're not talking about what is an end for, or what is valuable to, a sapient being. We're talking about what makes for satisfying or engaging game play, as per this post upthread: Setting aside the question of one poster's personal taste, there is still a "structural" or design issue...