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One idea I've toyed with over the years is for a system where every character makes two major selections; their race, which grants them an ability at every odd level, and class, which gives them an ability at every even level. Some ancestries have strong, locked in abilities that really...

Just to toy with this, if our goal is to use 5e classes but not have race as a separate choice silo, we could conceivably use ancestry-themed subclasses. Assuming classes are modified to allow for subclass as a choice at 1st level.

I really think that wasn't their intent, though. They simply assumed that the kinds of changes they were proposing were a natural evolution of gaming style; almost no one at the time (2006-2007) had any idea that the TTRPG base was actually going to fracture into different kinds of gamers...

MVP is a regular-season award. Using playoff results to justify a selection is bad post-hoc rationalization.

If railroading as a term is kind of fraught, isn't "GM force" just as challenging? I don't know what boundary I would draw around "GM force" and "normal GM play", and my gut feeling is that it's certainly game specific.

No spoilers, but I think the Patriots will pull it out.

That seems like a cynical ploy to get people to post Simpson memes, my friend.

I mean, if you as a GM frame a situation such that there is exactly one solution, you kinda laid down the tracks already, right?

The problem here is that assumes that playstyle preferences are some immutable thing that can't change over time.

No it doesn’t. The situations I described above are about stakes versus no stakes, not diegetic vs non-diegetic mechanics. Centering a game around diegetic mechanics can have utility for some play modes, but isn’t connected to the point I was making. A mechanic might be intended to directly...

Any time a scene is framed as "your characters are trapped", players are going to be somewhat unhappy. We instinctually want to escape from a trap, it's not surprising that a player who burns a 7th level slot on an escape spell that doesn't work is going to be salty about the combination of...

If we're staying in the fictional frame and not referencing the mechanics, one of two things is happening. 1) Nothing that has stakes and requires resolution is actually being resolved, so we're in thespian "acting like my character and having conversations" mode. Which I know plenty of...

Real people make stupid decisions with easily avoidable consequences all the time. Characters who always make the appropriate, rational decision all the time are an extremely poor simulation and violate my sense of verisimilitude.

Fair. But to a more positive spin on it, Scary Movie 3 was 20 years ago; TLoU and Chernobyl were much more recent. Sometimes people do just get better at their job!

Thanks for explicitly asking!

Yep. The strength of the BitD approach, to me, is that everything is negotiated out in the open. The GM can't leverage "the module" or "the campaign prep" to make a decision unilaterally. Can the GM decide the PC isn't going to achieve their goal simply by continually escalating challenges...

That's literally the opposite of what I want to pay people to write in things I purchase.

I'm OK with some level of restriction on class options, but it has to be really well grounded with strong worldbuilding. Dolmenwood, as an example, does a good job here by creating some classes built on social class (like knights) and also building in a strong distinction between mortals and...

I mean, if I think about illusionism I tend to associate that pretty strongly with trad play. I'm not sure what other kind of pretending might be going on; you'll have to spell it out for me.

I believe that to be the case for those using the specific 2024 rule set. Couldn't say for sure.