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Even with climbing or skiing, there may be some variation - for example, someone with an alpine adventuring background vs a bookworm from the city library. The alpine adventurer should be able to do things the bookworm can't and situations difficult for the bookworm would be routine for the...

I'm not really sure what you mean with "the numbers only go up". An RPG could model Vonn's injured ACL as a flat penalty on the die or some equivalent of disadvantage on the check. Various RPGs take things like injuries and deviations from fitness into account, but most don't because most don't...

Ultimately, this is 5e in a nutshell. This edition encourages the DM to make a determination of Yes/No based on what the PC brings to the table and the nature of the task, and then suggests rolling only when Yes/No is unknown/unclear. So yeah, don't make the priest of Osiris make a roll about...

Honestly, that's real life where events will follow as complex a set of factors as they must in order to resolve a question such as "who will win this skiing event". But for a game, we don't know all or even most of the factors so we replace it with a stochastic factor to account for all of...

Static. 3e is the best edition for laying out what a difficulty class was and why for specific tasks (which stands to reason since players having well-informed options was that edition's mantra). It was just a bit cumbersome to use efficiently. That's why I'm OK with the loosey-goosey difficulty...

Carolina Carnage butthurt live stream

You could look at it as enabling a free grappling check... or as enabling a grappling attack to not have to forego the possibility of doing damage. From that perspective, I think it's a nice feat that will encourage players to grapple a lot more. So I definitely wouldn't touch that provision...

Yeah, broken leg.

Who ordered the heaping helping of Dunning-Kruger?

I think the fairly obvious is that nobody decided this explicitly. Rather, it was the byproduct of other decision that had unintended side effects. This is the big, granddaddy reason. Once you started working with skills, largely starting with adding the thief, someone was gonna be the skill...

It may be one of those player kneejerk reactions that are kind of inexplicable. You can beat their PCs up, even kill them, and some players will shrug it off. But, oh man, imprison them or <shudder> destroy their stuff and they'll go ballistic.

This is one of those tricks of how normal procedures are practiced, I suppose. If the players don't have any significant input on the framing of the situation (whether a scene/situation or start of an adventure or even being together in a tavern and being approached by an adventure hook...

It's absolutely worth checking out. It's quite a performance.

Uh, I think some of that's Tolkien prior to D&D: Burgler Baggins. Dwarves like Thorin affected by dragon sickness. Bow-using elves come from Legolas. Orcs are just plain evil. And the wizards are old with long beards.

I thought the Muppets was actually quite good. They were definitely in the humor vein of 30 Rock and The Office more than the original Muppet Show. But I thought it worked pretty well and expanded on some of the characters without contradicting what they stood for. People forget that one of Jim...

There's going to be overlap just as there was in Rashomon. But everyone at the table has a different perspective on the game, how the campaign's events are unfolding, what importance and prominence they will assign to those events, and how they'll remember and think about them. Each player comes...

Too late. Prior art. The Rashomon effect (or principle) has been out as public term since about 1982.

This poor young woman's death once again reminds me why I live in a place where the air makes my face hurt for part of the year.

When I got it was the summer of 1981 and I was 12. I got the keys to the car from my mother, went out to the parking lot, and just started reading it. I remember thinking it was so in-depth about specifics compared to the Holmes Basic edition that my friend had.

This was a birthday gift from my elder daughter. So it's now on one (of many) of our bookshelves.