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Or the DM to ask the player how it works.

And given the existence of off the top of my head (a) Stargate, (b) Warhammer Tomb Kings, and (c) Necrons it seems pretty common and popular to want a mix of Ancient Egyptians and either androids or stone golems.

Night City is on a very different scale to Golarion. One's a city with determined slang and an observable hierarchy. The other is a "kitchen sink universe" with literally dozens of countries, each one with a hat including "having been The Terror of the French Revolution for literal decades". I...

Partially disagree. Players care about worldbuilding lore as long as they are allowed to do it rather than having it be something that is imposed on them mostly in the form of restrictions and things they are not allowed to do. Let the players build their own cultures and they will be invested...

Paizo just puts all its settings into Golarion and calls it a day. Goofy comic relief characters can be entirely integrated into a setting as my current Daggerheart campaign is demonstrating. It does however take a willingness for the GM to not be precious about their setting - which is at...

I'm saying that this is missing the problem entirely. Just as you can write modules to be written or write them to be played unless you tightly integrate the setting with the rules all pre-written settings are optimised to be read rather than played. But games need them because no one is going...

I'd argue that once you've got D&D's highly specific magic system (even more specific pre-4e) and D&D's class and level structure you aren't that flexible. And that D&D was a bad fit for both Planescape and Dark Sun because of this.

Exandria has always used the Dawn War cosmology right from the very earliest days of Critical Role (although there are some interlopers sometimes). I think from memory the Raven Queen predates 4e by technicalities but she was popularised through the Nentir Vale which used the Dawn War pantheon.

And this gets me into the distinction between settings meant to be read vs settings meant to be played. I think the only game without a setting that has a chance to get big is Daggerheart because it's settings that spark the imagination - but find that too much setting material has a negative...

I'm more interested in coherence than actual believability. A lot of fiction is about characters who aren't so much lifelike but have been turned up until the knob falls off. But this doesn't prevent them from having consistent and coherent motivations that are at the least amplified versions in...

iii) Games where you don't just have random PCs but where you create the group and even the setting together because you want to emphasise the roleplaying and character interactions. I can do the mechanical part of creating a PbtA or Daggerheart character faster than I can an AD&D character...

This is a matter of investment - player investment and DM investment. The players are not investing in the DM's setting and the DM isn't investing in the player's characters. So there's a disconnect. Historically D&D has gone through the hierarchical method that the DM creates the setting and it...

This confuses me because AD&D 2e is dead, buried, and rotted. It's not relevant to anything. There has arguably been at most one 2e splatbook this century (the Priest's Spell Compendium Volume 3 came out in 2000). By using AD&D 2e as your basis for comparison when even the quarter of a century...

Game balance is information. There is nothing inherently unbalanced about either a goblin or the Tarrasque (or one of your ultra big dragons). It's not even imbalanced to throw the Tarrasque at a level 3 party and watch them run - that's what the fiction indicates should happen. It would be...

Which came first? The chicken or the egg. (I know, I know. It's the chicken). But do you have a game if you don't have the framework of a story? With no objectives is it even a game? But I'm seeing a category error here; I believe you taught computer game design rather than tabletop roleplaying...

And there are explicit healing spells for curing actual injuries.

But the "healing magic" required of course neither repairs even remotely significant injuries nor cures disease. You need spells like Regeneration and Lesser Restoration for that.

What? A group of people who can't agree what their acronym stands for disagree on what the play is? Surely not! And long live that disagreement and willingness to try new things.

But there's a reason I call Pathfinder APs the Ideal Homes magazine of ttrpgs. It's not about pure creativity but also vibes and imagery.

As an aside modules are almost absent from the "post-Forge" PbtA/FitD end of the hobby. You create your settings as a part of character, and points of the setting have conflicts with the PCs. And the adventure spirals from. the potential consequences on every roll, tied far more closely to the...