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Fair enough: I sit rebuked. A given game can have an agreement (probably unspoken), a "game contract" that certain 'hijinx' are PC-only; that the NPCs will avoid them or act as if they don't exist, and if it works for that game, it works for that game. I will call it bad if there is such an...

The DM using PC style tactics against them often is uncool and unfair, and even bad DMing. But that's because those tactics are exploits that the PCs shouldn't be allowed to use either. That's been a touchstone of mine for a long time when I consider a rule interpretation or new house rule...

I'm sticking with 3.5e. I do heavily curate it, with a blanket-ban on 'prestige' classes and a "must be approved by the DM (me)" rule for any feats or spells outside of the core. And a white-list of "PCs must be one of the eight core PC races." 3.5e has flaws, and I've written rants about...

For me it's more about what I dislike than what I like - although there are some types of mechanics that I do like. I dislike automatic successes and failures, and I really dislike critical successes and critical failures. And I absolutely detest when critical success or failure produce...

My preferred city supplements are kits that provide pieces-parts to customize your own towns and cities while perhaps providing an example-city as an example. I'm fond of the old Flying Buffalo CityBooks, and also the even older (1979) Cities random-encounter book by Stephen Abrams and Jon...

My understanding is that tournament lances were designed to break - and were also designed with blunt tips. They were intended for sport, and getting killed by one was a matter of unintended and uncommon bad luck. The lances with pointy tips and a non-easy-to-break design were the ones used when...

Interesting. I wouldn't want to use cryptic codes that need a key to translate. I'd prefer tiny print that spelled out "overcast" or whatever. Transition to different seasons will be a significant problem: Temperature transitions in climates with wide seasonal swings in temperature, and (I'd...

I say that fighters are pigeon-holed as the "combat machine" or "dumb jock" class rather than "meat shield" but it works out to about the same thing. I like the idea of fighters being skill-monkeys in addition to their fighting ability, but then I like the idea of skill-monkeys in general. At...

It looks to me like a bad case of assumption clash and the player believing you to be acting in bad faith. The player may have an unstated assumption, for example, that burning a wish to leave the plane would be arbitrarily ruled to fail with the wish being wasted - and that would be a railroad...

I had mixed feelings about eliminating the class limits on races in 3.5e, even though I consider 3.5e "peak D&D" On the one hand I don't care for the aesthetics of e.g. Dwarven or Halfing wizards, and other hand there's that bit about making sure each nonhuman race is capable of functioning in a...

Over the years I've become less and less interested in anything involving "moving pictures" - TV, Movies, or Anime - and now I'm at the "refuse to partake" point. I never cared for audiobooks, either. I don't much like "masquerade" works - urban fiction based on the conceit of a secret...

I don't think having a game designed "purely by players" would be practical. Deliberately looking at rules and rule design from a player's POV is important, however. There is a very strong skew toward the GM point of view in common gaming advice and on fora like this one. That's something I've...

The juice needs to be worth the squeeze, not just for the GM, but for the players as well, and not just the first time but after 10 or 100 repetitions. If the complexity involves busywork and jumping through hoops "Because jumping through hoops is fun!" then I'll ask "Fun for who?" Players are...

I had a friend who once claimed that a stereotypical 4-color Superheroes setting was inherently a mashup of All The Genres, albeit at a high power level. He wasn't wrong.

I voted "more than about the weapon choice." But my druthers as a player is for archery, if forced to choose. If I had a "two weapon combat" character conception, I'd want it to be a swashbuckler type, and a ranger based build for that would end up as a "ranger in name only" sort of character...

It might be a good game, but it wouldn't be D&D. I say this as someone who has played (and run) games with fewer ability scores, more ability scores, and different ability scores. For some things I prefer them - so they're "good games" - but they are not D&D.

I do see the conflict. The immediate, obvious question from me as a player is "What things?" Until I know, I can't say what I do. That puts it back to the GM being in charge of world-building and offering options. But too often "the world is big and full of things" comes with an implied "and I...

I generally play humans when I play. For world-building and character creation as a GM or an author of read-only fiction, I favor goblins, halflings, and gnomes over the other 'small' folk. Gnomes I treat as variant dwarves; they're a single race. Halflings are strictly the furry-footed...

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.