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In my case: Because I like to get away from a Vancian magic system in favor of one with more-frequent casting of less powerful spells. One of my very early gripes about D&D was that it didn't have wizards but rather artillery pieces disguised as wizards. My preference for combat magic is for it...

Thank you. That looks like it works without the artifacts I see with ICODE tags. It was also one of those "That was obvious - after someone pointed it out to me" things.

Yes, and I was trying to ask if there was some way other than using the in-line code tags. And my post got munged by the forum software. It turns out there are [ icode ] tags as well as [ code ] tags here. This is italic and this is *starred*. Using the icode tags wrapped around the *starred*...

Well my personal definition of simulation is pretty much is the "simulationist" corner of the Threefold, as worked out in rec.games.frp.advocacy back in the day. Because I was there and helped (in a minor way) to create the Threefold. From the faq "simulationist": is the style which values...

It depends on what the players care about. It depends on the style of play that the players are looking for. Players of a simulationist bent want setting lore that's solid world-building and that they can hook their PC into, to make their PCs part of that world, as opposed to characters who...

It corresponds to the character forming a good-enough memory of the venue to be able to draw a map afterwards. I can draw sketch-maps, from memory, of a venue I've visited. I can draw sketch-maps from the description the GM is giving me right now. Drawing sketch-maps from the memory of a...

My preference is to show the on-graph-paper maps to the players, but if they want to draw their own, they have to use plain paper. I have an old essay cum rant that touches on this: Why Game Masters Should Give Players Exact Distances The usual argument, in a rpg, against giving players exact...

I voted Monster Manual, in large part because it was both my first AD&D purchase and one of my first RPG purchases of any sort. The DMG is interesting, but not my fave - and it also had the downside of my having had to wait for it to be published, after I already had the MM and PHB. (I'm not...

Is there any way to escape star (*) characters so that they show up as stars, rather than being 'helpfully' transformed into italic or bold BB markup? Other than surrounding them with ?

I prefer a system where character skill is more important than player skill, and where the player-skill element is more a matter of skill in manipulating the crunchy mechanics than in having real-world skill in the task the character is attempting. But I'm aware of the imperfect trade-offs and...

I can confirm that. I was there as one of the impure Simulationist GMs. And there were arguments about whether or not randomizers could improve fidelity to the game world's own internal logic and causality. I contributed to some of them, on the side of "Yes, they can." There was a consensus...

As you say: "That's one philosophy, but not mine." Or rather there's another trade-off. Yes it's nice when player cleverness aligns with what the character would do, and when players can make choices for their character's actions at a more detailed and less abstract level. But this is often not...

Hiding the tell in the "blahs" has its own drawbacks. Among other things it tests player-skill instead of character-skill. As a player who is playing (and who spent the character-resources to have) a highly noticing character, I'd want the reward of my character being highly noticing. As a GM...

Overall, I use traps very sparingly. They're a hassle for NPCs & monsters to set up, so they won't without believing they have a good reason to, and they're a hassle for me as a GM, so I won't go looking for reasons why the NPCs & monsters might set them up. Also, my NPCs and monsters mostly...

What do you mean by "tells"? They might be signs that "everyone sees automatically, the GM shouldn't require a roll." They might be signs that "characters with good perception scores may spot, even if not actively looking." They might be signs that "only characters who actively look for them...

I prefer to ban them completely. If you need an auto success/fail rule to hit/miss, that's the rules and the dice telling you that the GM should just hand out a "don't bother rolling the dice" result. Right now I'm leaving criticals in place for my 3.5e game where I'm trying to keep the house...

My "Brotherhood of Rangers" game is a "restricted gestalt" one: PCs must be ranger-gestalts with only one other class. It works very well, enough so that I'd try the concept again with a different class, given the appropriate campaign idea. E.g. a "Dungeoneering in the Megadungeon" game where...

Re 'joke' characters, I've done a few tongue-in-cheek things as NPCs, so my touchstone for joke or joke-adjacent PCs is "Would this character fit in my game setting if I created it as an NPC?"

As a GM I dodge the issue through a combination of having racially cosmopolitan nations and strict enforcement of "approved PC races only." In one game where I specifically wanted mostly-human PCs, I had a rule that to play an non-human PC, the player first had to bribe the GM by creating a...

I prefer to have magic-augmented economies in my game-worlds. Magic-augmented food production in particular, but also other forms of magical augmentation, often running below the level of broken-out detail in the rules for regular official magic. Instead, it's things like having various peasant...