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From WotC's point of view, why do they care that some of the people who play D&D are not as satisfied as they might, ideally, be? They are a large commercial operation. Their goal is sales. Satisfying RPGers is a means to that end, but given the seeming commercial success of 5e D&D, they seem to...

Reaction tables aren't (in my view) about reducing GM workload in generating content. They're an action resolution tool (if the players declare an action like *We greet the <NPCs>") or a framing/stakes tool (if the PCs are thrust into an encounter with some NPCs). Treasure tables, and random...

I haven't read Daggerheart, but I am inferring that experiences in Daggerheart are similar to the backgrounds in 13th Age: free descriptors that play a similar role, in resolution, to skill bonuses in 3E and onwards D&D. Have I got that right?

I think it's more than just this: it's also about increasing the proportion of play time spent on the stuff that matters to the participants. So it's like the RPG design analogue of editing a film (or, at least, some aspects of editing). Rolemaster is, for me at least, a striking illustration...

Good list! For these two, I think maybe Over the Edge (1992) is the modern beginning. A bit later, Maelstrom Storytelling (1998, from memory) and HeroWars (2000) use free-form descriptors as key tools for describing characters and situations. What's interesting (and here I gently touch on your...

I've got a view on this: it's analytical and genealogical. Classic D&D is, at its core, a game of puzzle-solving. At the start of the game, the GM has all the information (in the form of the map and the key), and the players have almost none (perhaps some rumours, not all of which they can rely...

I've run multiple campaigns of 60+ sessions: early B/X and AD&D campaigns, and then two in Rolemaster, of around 300+ sessions each (both got to levels in the mid-to-upper 20s); and a 4e D&D game to 30th level (in about 120-odd sessions). Over the past decade or so most of my games have been...

An addendum to the above post: upthread someone talked about sim vs "gamism" in the context of classic Gygaxian D&D. For the game to work as a game - that is, for the players to be able to do the "skilled play" thing - it has to be possible for the players to reasonably infer things about the...

@mamba, I've quoted a series of your posts. And am trying to work out what your position is. At some points, you seemed to be talking about players' power: to declare actions, to avoid a narrow theme, etc. Now, you seem to be talking about a GM's power to decide what happens next without...

To me, the relatives rule looks like a rule intended to serve the purpose of getting a player whose PC dies back into the game. It reminds me a bit of the rule in Torchbearer that lets a player carry a (limited) amount of Fate and Persona from a dead character to a new character. The 10% tax...

Right. If I read someone's account of how they use exhaustion/stamina-type conditions for walking long distances, and implement twisted ankles for falling into a pit trap, and worry about hands being severed by a hidden blade in the ominous hand-sized opening trap - but no character in their...

I don't understand why. AW has a rule for resolving any declared action. It actually is broader, in that respect, than any version of D&D prior to 4e.

You seem to think that resolving a player's move, in AW, is profoundly different from resolving a player's declared action, in D&D. I don't know why.

As per my reply to @thefutilist not far upthread, which talks about RM, I think there are limits in that game (and similar games) to how far you can get with committing yourself, as MC/GM, to the game's fiction's own internal logic and causality. I also discovered this with Classic Traveller -...

For me, "play to find out what happens" - if it is to be meaningful - has to include the GM. So I see any notion of the GM having a pre-determined pathway or storyline or "big reveal" in mind as a departure from "play to find out what happens". You give a couple of examples, but there are many...

I can see why you say this. But then it seems to pick up T&T. And bits of D&G (eg saving throws and hp, at least as Gygax articulated them in his AD&D rulebooks).

My view of sim play is mixed. I think the idea of relying on mechanics to specify outcomes of declared actions, by modelling/representing (in some fashion) in-fiction causal processes, is a real aspiration (I did GM Rolemaster near-weekly for about 9 years, and then near-fortnightly for another...

I'm not sure what you mean by this. RPGs are games. They are played by participants, who - as in any game - make "moves" that cause the game to unfold/develop/change/progress. What is distinctive about most RPGs (and is true of all the ones I've seen mentioned in this thread) is that (i) the...

Vincent Baker deliberately used some jargon to avoid carrying over too much baggage from other RPGs. But the MC is a GM. "Playbooks" are classes/professions/occupations. Other RPGs have GM moves (not all of them, but some of them), they just don't call them that. Harm clocks are a type of hit...

I don't really know what you mean by this. Eg I'm not sure what your "it" is, that you say is aiming at providing something else that is not as tightly controlled. GURPS (to pick up on an example that's been discussed) is very broad in the topics of fiction that it aims to be able to represent...