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The rules say that "When you take the Magic action, you cast a spell that has a casting time of an action or use a feature or magic item that requires a Magic action to be activated." The Reaction that follows readying a spell is neither the casting of a spell (the spell has already been cast...

Your proposed rule - "You may choose to Ready your action (or the ability to move up to your speed). Doing so allows you to take the action as a Reaction in response to a set trigger, which must be a perceivable circumstance." - doesn't treat Ready as an action in itself. Rather, it is a type of...

Nor does it specifically say that a <thing that I have my PC do> is both a Reaction and an action having a category (such as Attack, Magic, etc). It leaves that to be inferred. And the idea of "spending" a Reaction to use an action is not set out in the rules either. Eg when a player has their...

I don't think railroading depends on a lack of player acceptance. A lot of RPGing that players accept involves railroading! I've played in railroad scenarios - mostly CoC ones, years ago now at conventions - that were well-done and enjoyable. And in more recent years I've run some railroad-y...

"Specific beats general" is a principle for establishing hierarchies of norms. Not for varying, or departing from, lists and definitions. The "clearly laying out" isn't a way of changing the action economy, though. It's a way of making readying a spell more "burdensome" than (say) readying an...

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...