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Eh, XP are just thousands of mini milestones that ostensibly get handed out for treasure or monster killing, and if the mid-80s can teach us anything, it's that what XP incentivises isn't the full picture of what motivates players to send their characters off on adventures. (E.g. by then modules...

This is objectively false. In the first place, it's a bald assertion of principle with nothing to back it up. Sure, you can say any given mechanic is bad design and on the basis of any principle you assert, but so what? In the second place, it's committing a pretty fundamental error in...

If anything, the fact that the "Hickman Revolution" happened during the age of 1e AD&D and B/X-BECMI, where dungeon-crawling or procedural world-sim play were still what the mechanics of the game supported and encouraged, belies this assertion. Another thing that belies this assertion are all...

I want to iterate on this, because I think there's something missing here - it's not just about avoiding random encounters. There's also a subtle push-your-luck play going on here! Why are you encumbered, and therefore moving more slowly, and therefore at greater risk of random encounters and...

Now I come to think of it, I mentioned more about being at 0 hit points in the berserker post, and then forgot to bring it up! So here it is. In classic 4e, when you hit 0 hit points, you are out of the action, unconscious, making saving throws until you either die, roll a natural 20 on a save...

The Berserker The 4e barbarian is a primal-theme class. (Indeed, that's their power source in 4e.) I think I'd like this game's equivalent to be more of a martial-themed class. Core Ideas I had worked up a prototype/pre-generate berserker, but I think I'll be rejigging it to better fit the...

My employment has cycles of activity - low activity in the summer, picking up to a peak just before Christmas, then relatively busy through the spring after a holiday break. So things have been a bit slow. Also, since the sort of niche this game was occupying as it was conceived over the summer...

I'm a bit surprised at the view that favouring patrons - who doubtless have way more skin in the game than backers do over the long term - is somehow "insulting" to backers. Backers are helping get one project off the ground. The patrons are the folks helping keep the lights on over the long...

It's not a demerit of 4e that it doesn't support "low-importance" fights as a means of daily attrition. One does not have to like that about the game, but to my mind that's a matter of personal preference, rather than a design problem of the game itself. At any rate, it's plainly incorrect to...

My deepest condolences. It's supposed to go the other way around, that (adult) children bury their parents, and it's just not right. Best wishes as you navigate your journey of grief.

5e can do heroic fantasy play, but it's not focused on it because it's also trying to have rules elements (even if they're vestigial) that appeal to classic attritional play. IIRC what happens is some of your abilities get buffs as you gain Victories; you don't spend the Victories. For...

I'm sure it's come up already in the thread how well 4e makes characters feel heroic in play, but here's a timely example from just a little earlier this evening. I'm playing in a 4e game, with a 12th-level dragonborn paladin. A bunch of enemies are clustered in a convenient 5-by-5 area, so I...

I mean, you're not wrong, strictly speaking - but, well, it's all too easy to forget, or misinterpret remarks, etc. By way of example from another domain, I personally have never - not once - had any difficulty navigating either the website of the charity I work for or the online platform we...

It is (to my mind) blisteringly obvious that the Realms, and the Sword Coast region in particular, was, at 5e's outset, as close as it gets to being a "default" setting for D&D, de facto if not formally designated as such. Adventures The vast majority of adventures published to date are set in...

I'm generous in terms of providing information that I think the characters would know if it seems like the players don't (or have forgotten) or reminding them of risks they're likely to face. As others have said, ideally, if the player characters are going to get themselves in a pickle, it...

It seems to me that there is rather a difference between being surprised and being appalled or disappointed, a distinction that I feel comes across as not being fully appreciated in the OP. But both feelings can be summarised within the term "shocked" (indeed, I would say that "shocked" is...

Rules light RPGs or RPGs with very bespoke designs and ambitions probably don't. A game like D&D does, eventually. A given edition just gets too cluttered. Janky mechanics just get too tiresome to deal with. The soft reset of the 2024 release is probably a better course for D&D, though, than...

"Where there's a whip there's a will, my slugs. Hold up! I'd give you a nice freshener now, only you'll get as much lash as your skins will carry when you come in late to your camp. Do you good. Don't you know we're at war?"

I do quite like the attempt in the Vault of the Drow to describe something that we literally cannot perceive with our own senses! Apropos of @Whizbang Dustyboots last post, there can be found passages of text in other D&D works that to my mind approach High Gygaxian without quite going over the...

So, long story short, the Rise of Tiamat game I've been DMing has finally come to an end, with a surprisingly poignant moment for me. We've been using Roll20 for maps and Discord for chat and die rolling. Despite my best efforts, the player character party was severely under-leveled by the time...