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I don't see a compelling reason this needs to go either way. Your case here doesn't suggest the GM has actually done any world building, and if that's the case, I don't know why she would say no (I wouldn't in her shoes at this point). On the other hand, I don't think this would be a huge...

It's very clear at this point that no one is winning anything here. :p

That's not exactly what I meant, and I think my description is colored by all the board game design I've been doing lately. The whole point of that kind of art is to package a specific kind of striving experience into a box and hand it to people who might be interested in having it. A playtester...

I asked my friend the other day if the coffee he'd given me was a natural process (he's normally a dark roast guy and I was surprised to get some acid), and he said "no, I just use like a pour over, and I added some pumpkin spice seasoning" and I realized we were not coming from the same place.

Woah! That's a lot of steps to walk from where I'm at, not the least because I'm not especially storytelling inclined. If I had a strong interest in narrative, I would obviously be writing novels. Perhaps if there was a strong tradition for fictional travelogues or gazetteers outside of like...

I continue to be sad I mentioned tortles. Setting that aside, there's clearly a norm at stake here that I don't think is reconcilable. This discussion really seems to be focused on a conflict about what GMs do. If I'm completely honest, the whole appeal of the activity is the building out a...

....I really shouldn't have brought up tortles in my initial "stuff you might not include in a proposed setting" example. That was clearly more resonant than blood magic.

I've always had a soft spot for True Sorcery.

You might like Trespasser? It's got a much more character ability forward combat setup than most OSR games, but a thoroughly explicated exploration and base-building system built around resource management. I'm very impressed with the gameplay loop of founding a Haven, then planning journeys to...

While trying to find a reasonable priced copy of the textbook Characteristics of Games (George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield & K. Robert Gutschera) on the back of a talk referencing it that left me very interested, I ran into Games: Agency As Art by C. Thi Nguyen and I have never been more...

Well now you're into the toolbox vs. self-contained genre option. Personally, I would much prefer a game that is internally consistent enough to support a singular rules derived setting (or set of setting norms). Changes to that setting would then prompt rules changes, perhaps guided by some...

I think you're catastrophizing a little here. There's usually a little more going on, particularly in a gaming situation where setting is the responsibility of one party. If the point is to present a well-realized, internally coherent setting to the players to interact with, setting limitations...

That looks a lot more to me like the problem was the monster not having the same number of actions as the party. And as he calls out in the beginning of the post, was viable because the party didn't have any action denial options. Plus, the problem that's really being solved here is "how do we...

I've come around to making both critique and design in RPGs much more explicit about design goals. We waste a lot of time on "this was designed badly" when we mean "I want this goal to inform the design." It's frankly a more frustrating conversation, because the rebuttal is usually just "I don't...

I get it, I'm still baffled that you can publish an RPG without a skill system, and then people will think it has a skill system (ironically something 5.5 took the tiniest of steps towards changing), but I think that's down where individuals have indexed. @TwoSix is right to call out these...

Well, that's kind of exactly it, isn't it? Fiction as a constrain on design, vs. a tool to explain the design. The problem with D&D's toolbox nature and long history is that the anchoring on which fiction is constraint and which fiction is irrelevant are super variable from user to user. Really...

To be fair (and acknowledging we have to give a lot of grace if someone was basing a sim perspective on 5e to begin with), the complaint isn't adversarial, it's about inclusion; why was my design goal not worth the complexity? It's not that someone else put some part of the gameplay experience...

I do wonder if there is a model of RPG play in there somewhere, where we remove direct player to PC control, in favor of a more explicitly shared party. The gameplay loop underlying creating and executing a shared plan is obviously present either way, but making it much more explicitly the basis...

I'm not describing "negotiation" in the game, I'm describing the core gameplay loop of negotiating with the GM; player proposes an action, GM proposes a DC and/or range of possible effects, GM describes what actually happens after dice are rolled. Ideally everyone discussed what would happen...

I'd love to see RPGs in general and D&D in particular turn away from negotiation as the basic interaction mechanic, but we haven't had a fully fleshed out skill system for nearly 20 years. I think the player muscle for leveraging rules that way is just gone; players who came into the game with a...