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I had the unique experience of reading the continuation fantasy series, Shadow Moon, Shadow Dawn and Shadow Star with no knowledge of the film. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found them very confusing, but I have vaguely fond memories, which is apparently not the norm. I don't think any further...

I've come to believe there's a hierarchy of how strong a negative reaction you're likely to get from a mechanic that isn't mapped that way from the set of people who care about it. In relative order of importance: Temporal mapping: if the action doesn't map forward in time to the character's...

Excellent! Perhaps if I throw a physical copy at my players, they'll consider multiclassing.

I think we talked about it elsewhere, but I feel like there's daylight between "change the rules to produce the desired fiction" and "create fiction/make decisions with intentional disregard of the rules." I'm distrustful of any system that punishes people for trying to understand or use it; if...

I think we can go a step further to an even more excluded middle: skill DCs tied to player facing abilities instead of external challenges. Once you can hit the "climb 1 handed at full speed" DC, that might influence the kinds of challenges that ought be framed for you, but it's not a property...

Imagine if DCs weren't something you, the GM, put down like locks/roadblocks and instead were the percentage chance of activation for specific player abilities. We generally don't consider parties without access to specific spells unable to engage.

@TwoSix explained it pretty well. It's a mistake to focus on a given die roll; I don't care if I succeed on a climb check, but if my character's goal is getting into that fortified zoo to rescue an awakened giraffe, what is the best set of actions I can declare to get that result? Ideally, the...

That puts me in kind of a different Alexandrian article. 3e's mistake was failure to extrapolate far enough above that well defined baseline, but the ultimate lesson seems to have been "wow we wasted a lot of time making that all make sense." I want more design cycles calibrating jump checks...

I've argued elsewhere before that spells are a better basic interaction game than skills. Ideally, skills would just be a defaulting mechanism you'd call on when players aren't using class abilities to interact with the world, either because they don't see the situation as a meaningful problem...

You're mixing up "resolution" and "gameplay" here. Gameplay is leveraging the stuff you have to get the thing you want. The gameplay in liar's dice, for example, is in gauging the likely distribution, considering the space lost by each raised bet, trying to raise your opponent to an untenable...

It's funny to see skills as more damaging than "spells that let you skip the problem" a criticism I also felt was entirely off-base. You're right that at least has a resource management component, but like combat the real underlying resource should still be action economy. There's space for a...

That's treading dangerously close to the 4e skill challenge synthesis. Ideally, those numbers aren't just a pacing mechanism, but a gameplay mechanism; they provide a set of abilities that players can leverage against the setting to get the outcomes they want. I want to be inside that castle, I...

Sure would help if we actually had tasks appropriate to each DC laid out, so we'd know exactly how competent a rogue is supposed to be....and putting down my "everything since the 3.x era skill system has been backsliding" drum, more broadly anything that can be resolved in a single skill check...

I've found your points insightful in the past, but I don't think you're doing your best work here. You're trying to make a call to "Improv" and "Yes, and" as established, clear rules we all understand and that's just not the case. Improv games are a diverse field taught in a grand variety of...

Surges were probably the biggest branding mistake 4e made. Call it "healing tolerance" and write out "25% of their hit point total" each time and they'd be much better understood. There's arguments to be had over whether players should generally go into each encounter at full HP or not...

Far too much to hope we'll reinvent in a mere 10 more years.

The original sin is the link between ability scores and accuracy. As long as that persists (and defenses scale at all) it's always going to be optimal to maximize that number. Ability scores can't be an interesting flavor choice if they're also the value that determines if your action was wasted...

It's they/them pronouns for Erika Ishii, the performer, and then the character is she/her. Everyone on WBN has talked quite a bit about inhabiting "writer brain" as well as "actor brain" and sometimes separately "character brain," so this kind of exploration of character is absolutely something...

Precisely. The strong version of that point is that mechanisms of good OC play are meta-textual to the rules, which I'm not totally sure I believe, but I haven't actually seen mechanisms that achieve the desired results without breaking some other part of the experience. I have a theory that...

For sure it is. I think the big thing that makes it look any different there is just the caliber of performers. I think they're absolutely playing in the space you call out in your earlier example with our two estranged brothers, it's just that the boundaries of that space are much bigger, due...