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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...

Dang. I would Heat you, but I’d have to charge.

My clocks all bring the guards to the yard.

I don't think there's anything wrong with a mechanism that puts mechanical pressure on the players to ablate the pressure soon or suffer the consequences. It's not very different from hit points in that regard; you aren't suffering any specific consequence when you're at 30 HP out of 50, except...

I'm not quite sure why the mechanical play of "Set up as many clocks as possible, and finish the job just before any/all of them tick over" wouldn't produce the play you want? Avoiding consequences with a last minute maneuver or knick-of-time save seems to me to be firmly in the "desired...

Agree with all of this. Assuming that, the interesting question to me becomes "What do gods provide, in the context of gameplay, that other sources of faith/divine magic can not?" And the one thing that jumps out to me is personification. If you have gods as gods in your setting, why not make...

To riff on this a bit: The Azathoth Black Hole (Negative Material?) at the center of the galaxy. Surrounding it are the four elemental planes. Within the elemental storm floats Sigil, an eternal station within the rotating elemental storm. Outside of the elemental ring are the shattered...

I mean, Sigil is supposed to the ultimate transitive plane, so I’d expect to see it sandwiched between the Astral and the Elemental singularity region.

First RPG-adjacent purchase, as it was what got me into RPGs later on.