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The thread has largely moved on, but this discussion tickled something in my brain, and reminded me we've had a similar exchange before. I think we might be running into a values problem when discussing this that we're not actually closing the loop on. You've focused regularly on skill or...

I'm very fond of the True Sorcery system, but it's heavy in a way that feels wildly out of time now.

Fantasy Craft's tricks were a significant improvement on this style of feat design. They took a different resource that was more plentiful, and they were all explicitly written as riders on existing actions, with an inherent limitation that you can't use more than 1 per action (barring some...

I believe I was pretty clear. The GM attempts to map from prior established facts and causal chains of events to get to the current board state. My whole initial point was that reducing that process to a single thing, instead of acknowledging that you could use a bunch of approaches with...

Nope. Only one of those things is true in the board state that is at stake. We can quibble about how we get to that point, but we have used our limited technology, the brain of the GM mapping from prior events and established facts about the world, to get to one singular result that is true of...

I mean, if I had my druthers it would look like: More detailed skills that scaled better/faster to appropriately high leveled actions Consolidating later skill usages into the base skill system Universalized spell DC scaling (scaling DC with spell level was a bad idea, I'm less sold than...

Yeah, absolutely. We've got ongoing design work derived from basically every other iteration of D&D at this point. 3e is the only edition that's really treated as closed, we're even seeing a spike of interest in 4e derived designs lately. The 3pp market for 3e/PF1 was massive, if all you're...

Good feat design? :p Really though, the answer is design progress and completeness. PF1 was absolutely just nibbling around the edges of change, and at best cleaned up things like the weirdness of skill scaling and dead class levels, and doing strange things, like doubling the number of feats...

Alright, give me a little credit as a person who's played games before. I don't particularly like poker (I'm in the particular board game camp that objects to gambling as a game mechanic in general), but I by no means don't understand it. I'd have more fun playing a round of The Gang, but...

Unfortunately, I think PF1 ate the opportunity for a game with this design lineage. The problem is that 3e is a quite heavy design task, and the audience that is specifically interested in it has proven to be significantly smaller than expected. 5e is mostly proof that a lot of the audience...

Some classes (like Heralds, the Paladin equivalent) get access to spells by thematic tag. It's pretty common to get "add all spells of the Law school to your class spell list" as a feature.

I'm well aware, and find your take reductive, self-serving and unhelpful. That you can't differentiate which of two designs might serve me better says more about the limitations of your framework for evaluating them, or more charitably, that your goals for play are too narrow. You'll simply have...

Woah, we're not interchangeable. I think games can and should specify all possible points of interaction while still using task resolution; plans are built out of stacking actions drawn from a set of pre-knowable mechanics. My sense of Micah is that they're more amenable to GM designed...

You're turning over a ton of control to randomness in this hypothetical challenge focused system. The appeal of the alarm spell is precisely that it does not interact with randomness in that way; it requires specific countermeasures, and if the opposition doesn't use them, they fail. The...

Other way around. Technology is compositionally different from magic. Issuing a worker with a mage hand rod to get hard to reach items is a technological use of magic. Magic is about some kind of situational alternative to physics, technology is about finding useful applications of principles...

I've always struggled thematically with that take, not so much because of what it says about magic, but what it says about about technology. It's not reducible to a domain the same way magic is; tech is just combining known properties in useful ways. In settings where you try to put it alongside...

That just sounds like more reason to put it into the PHB. If there's military applications for non-combat magic, or as is more often the case, economic applications of combat magic, then the setting rapidly starts to feel artificial if you try and draw a division between the two. If a PC can...

I'm firmly in the "anything" school, but I'd prefer it be significantly better distributed. The Wizard spell list already could easily support 7-8 classes. It would hardly be D&D if it couldn't support the basic utility of stoneshape, invisibility, and summon monster, but I don't particularly...

I quite like the model in this product: Ozaka's Guide to Legions

No, precisely the opposite. My point was that the fiat-less mechanic demonstrated cannot do some of the things the alarm spell as presented could. I am absolutely not making the system doesn't matter point, I'm saying this fiat/no-fiat divide isn't a particularly incisive divide (or at least...