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Absolutely. You could quite easily have the strength and prowess to slay a giant yet be helpless aboard a boat in a hurricane. I don't see how it is strange that a character could be unbeatable in a boxing ring, yet subject to being frozen to death or drowned. I don't think the ability to...

Sigil.

I interpret Gobhag as saying that a player who isn't skilled at intrigue and social deduction or manipulation needs rules to support their character being skilled at such things because otherwise the player is denied the ability to play a character who has skills and talents they don't have. In...

I disagree, but my disagreement requires you understanding what a transcript of play is and why it matters and the difference between an outcome and an experience. A transcript is the recording of the actual events that occurred in character in the story - what the characters actually said or...

No system can actually deal with that. It's a special case of a general problem that no system can take the player entirely out of the character. Players have to make choices, and if they are terrible at making choices no system can protect them from that. You can have the most system capable...

I can't speak for anything post 3.0e and my rules are slightly tweaked so I don't even remember but RAW is but it is at least theoretically possible for toe foes to kill each other in my 3e game. 1) If both fighters have the same initiative count and the same DEX bonus, they go simultaneously...

Oh no, we in fact agree entirely. It's that you don't understand what I'm saying or don't seem to think what I object to matters.

This is not a problem with D&D specifically. This is a problem with skill challenges generally. If for example you present a hard stealth challenge, then it's almost certainly better to send in a single stealth specialist than it is to try to have the entire group pass the challenge given...

I disagree. I think courtly intrigue works best with a very light social system and D&D supports that perfectly. I've been in a courtly intrigue campaign. It doesn't surprise me that "social combat" rules didn't work. I wouldn't expect them to. I would expect that it's very hard to do...

Gore horror isn't even to me horror because the emotion it's tickling isn't fear but squeamishness. It's forcing disgust and not fear, and disgust is a very different thing than fear. Disgust tends to accompany either anger or pity, but fear really only gets involved with disgust if you are a...

There are a lot of genres that I think can only come off successfully if you have a group of thespian minded people who want to just act together and do improv theater and play make believe like a bunch of kids. That's I think a relatively rare sort of group of players to get together.

I can enjoy being a player but I can't run it because I'm not particularly witty or funny and as a GM I tend to take things very seriously. As a result, me running Paranoia turns the game into a Horror genre, which, if you think about it, it is.

My wife hates watching MCU movies because there are invariably multiple 10 minute fist fights in the movie and she gets bored in them. Fight choreography has no interest to her. Combat isn't an interesting spectacle for her.

I will admit to having very little breadth to my RPG experiences. I have only played various types of fantasy - generic fantasy, horror fantasy, and science fantasy. I have very little idea how to run or tell stories in other genres for an RPG and indeed, can't imagine how they would work from...

Because players don't have to improvise content on the fly. If you are a GM you are frequently improvising content on the fly, and there are two standards for doing that - invent what you think is narratively useful at the moment or invent what you think is appropriate for the setting. If you...

@kigmatzomat I think that is a much more functional way to look at the problem. The question isn't really "what's typical in fiction", but what's typical in the campaign that I'm running. Establishing demographics is IMO one of the most important things a DM can do when preparing a campaign...

That was true by 3.5e but in 3.0e there were rules for 0th level characters. It would be fairer to say most adults were assumed to be at least 1st level commoners. Who except in basic life skills and resistance to energy drain was more or less equivalent to a 2nd or 3rd level PC classed...

My point is that your example of what is typical is one of the least typical settings of all time and one of the ones that is most removed from typical fantasy literature in how it is described in its game books. Not so much among experts in Tolkien lore. The author is calling out people for...

Try running a campaign based on your theories and get back to me.

Frodo carries the ring because Gandalf can't, by his own confessionm do so. Gandalf says, "I can't, because I'd fail my saving throw." One could argue that Sam, Pippin, and Merry start out as henchmen, but if you are reading the book rather than watching the movie, it's clear Frodo is the...