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I generally agree, though I would say that magic makes overwhelming the DC without taking 10 much more likely (though climb may be a bad example there, as it's routinely overwhelmed by spider climb). I'd point out a separate feature of the mechanic (not necessarily relevant to sim), in that...

I'm more a modern roguelike guy, but sure. I just think tabletop environments with my friends and a dedicated person for content generation are better at it.

Oh god, I played a lot of Talisman back in my youth and heartily hope never to play any more ever again. That being said, I don't see a problem with this. I don't think the roleplaying would be especially good, but I mostly see it as the tool we use to get to those victory conditions. If...

I don't have an object swinging system off the top of my head, but I want to point out that I don't actually care if they perfectly fulfill a genre convention; I would rather have a player note there is a chandelier and decide not to swing on it, because that would be an ineffective move than...

This is always my problem, whenever the "crazy example" comes up, it just reads as a clear design prompt to me. Does your game not have improvised weapon and object interaction rules? That feels pretty easy to resolve without particularly complicated systems. See also "swinging from chandeliers."

This is a crude approach in an already terrible context that will only make things worse, but I could see an argument for wanting to limit de minimis more broadly. I don't think the business model that Temu built entirely off the back of it is particularly good for the world or worth...

Precisely. I think there is unique value to the TTRPG form that doesn't come solely at the expense of all the other stuff.

The ur-example is the 3e climbing rules. They're pretty action complete. I wouldn't overindex on "knowing the outcome" here though. Randomness in resolution, hidden elements on the board state, baffling actions by other parties and so forth could lead to undesired or unaccounted for outcome, all...

I really don't think that's necessary, especially once you add some expected genre/structure constraints and zoom out the abstraction a little. More structurally though, I think you could absolutely have an RPG with very constrained actions as long as you have unbounded play time, player set...

To calculate the most efficient DPR trade-off once you've determined the enemy's AC, especially if you're using and extra stuff that adds on modifiers, like Shock Trooper. It's not a wild idea, though a "spreadsheet" is a bit of hyperbole for what was mostly a set of benchmarks. I definitely had...

I think that's more dogma than fact, but more importantly I think directionally wrong for design. Starting from an assumption that your game is necessarily incomplete and will be subject to adhoc rules design later encourages bad design thinking. I don't think we fundamentally disagree here, I...

I am not totally sure what point about spells you're referring to, I think I'm just missing the post looking back, but I'm not sure my point about negotiation should be bundled broadly into that discussion. I think negotiation is an unpleasant gameplay experience that eats up a lot of design...

I think there's an issue of timing at least. The sort of clarification as fictional creation you're talking about happens before action declaration and certainly not as part of resolution. I think there's also a question of contingency, though the GM closing to use a random table does complicate...

It's not a particularly valid experiment, but several of these players are also my board game friends; they routinely show up to play games without ambiguous resolution, some of similar length to an RPG session. My opinion is that this isn't a fixed preference so much as a received norm of the...

I might simply be more sensitive to it, but I routinely have players asking if they can do something, and then expecting a DC to be produced, and then possibly feeling the DC is unreasonable, or alternately succeeding on a check, and then being disappointed with how I describe their success...

I should clarify that I'm saying if negotiation is a normative process of resolution (what is the possible impact of any given check? How bad is a failure? What are the board state costs of complications/mitigiated successes?) and especially if those states aren't knowable before resolution...

I'm talking about situations, ("where is the bookshelf in relation to the table?") not rules clarification there. I'm of the opinion every ruling a GM makes is a design failure.

That's directionally a good start, but you'd also need to spell out the consequences and risks preemptively and absolutely. I suppose you could have a bundled read runes action, but I think you're losing more than you're gaining by not having a pre-specified board state.

Right, that's how I end up backdooring into the simulation question. Maybe that's the real divide, whether negotiation is to be embraced or avoided. I much prefer to cast what does have to happen as clarification instead of negotiation when possible. Better to at least try to have a consistent...

Oh, I'd argue the opposite, I associate negotiation with narrativism. I've been characterized as gamist a few times, and I've been pretty consistent in calling out negotiation as a pretty miserable gameplay experience. It's both parasitic and flattening; once you let negotiation about the...