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Thanks for explicitly asking!

Yep. The strength of the BitD approach, to me, is that everything is negotiated out in the open. The GM can't leverage "the module" or "the campaign prep" to make a decision unilaterally. Can the GM decide the PC isn't going to achieve their goal simply by continually escalating challenges...

That's literally the opposite of what I want to pay people to write in things I purchase.

I'm OK with some level of restriction on class options, but it has to be really well grounded with strong worldbuilding. Dolmenwood, as an example, does a good job here by creating some classes built on social class (like knights) and also building in a strong distinction between mortals and...

I mean, if I think about illusionism I tend to associate that pretty strongly with trad play. I'm not sure what other kind of pretending might be going on; you'll have to spell it out for me.

I believe that to be the case for those using the specific 2024 rule set. Couldn't say for sure.

I mean, we have plenty of highly competitive events where the end-state isn't determined by a particular metric, but by an evaluated critique. There's a big one happening right now in the Winter Olympics; figure skating. But even in trad-style games, it's not like a determinable metric of...

Your goal as a group is to produce compelling fiction. Your characters have goals, but they're a piece of the fiction, not the point of play. You can produce compelling fiction whether or not your character succeeds. As a player, succeeding on checks is generally better than not, because it...

Yep. A fantasy setting generally needs some kind of underlying cosmology if it's going to have magic, especially the visible and regimented D&D-style magic. If you don't use the planes, you probably want at least a broad outline of what might be there instead. Once you have that sorted out...

It IS weird. The root cause is the "round down" rule, which causes the discrepancy because the actual single class progression for partial casters (1/2 like rangers and paladins, or 1/3 for EKs and ATs) rounds up. Most games I play with using bog-standard 5e use Beyond, so it hasn't come up in...

Micah, I am 100% sure you are aware that you would hate playing a game like Blades.

I don't really see clocks as a mechanism for avoiding consequences. I see them as a method for staggering the consequences out over the course of a score. For @Lanefan's specific example, I would clarify that you shouldn't try to avoid consequences by doing some kind of "But what about X"...

I think we all know Lucas has a lot to answer for. :)

Yea, I doubt it was specifically D&D. Martial arts related media had a major boom in the '70s, and there were plenty of manga, anime, and live action films for creators to draw from. I would guess the FF1 Monk/Black Belt took more from Fist of the North Star than D&D. But disentangling the...

For sure. I mean, in '77 D&D was still just Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and Halfling Hobbits. I'd be willing to bet that the aesthetic of having a Mos Eisley cantina worth of different races in a setting was a direct result of the popularity of Star Wars.

I think part of the issue there is that it's coming from an old-school approach where consequences are something to be avoided, rather than leaned into because they help generate more interesting fiction. Avoiding consequences and conflict to make events easier for the characters generates a...

Shadow of the Weird Wizard does this nicely; all of the non-human ancestries have a base set of abilities, and also have the option to take a distinct racial class that strengthens those abilities instead of one of the starting classes like warrior or mage.

In my settings, dwarves are always the primary wizards and magic item crafters; I’ve been doing that since 3e. I never liked the “elven wizard” trope; elven concepts always seemed to fit better with sorcerers or clerics to me.

It's the Rashomon effect; each participant's recollections are their own story, and each story illustrates a part of the greater whole.

Pacing. There are benefits to allowing to tension and pressure to build, especially in the context of a game built on heists and scores. Forcing an immediate, in situation consequence that causes the situation to be reframed every time a roll fails isn't ideal. Sometimes you need to let...