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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...

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?