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For what it's worth, the last time I ran Ravenloft as part of Curse of Strahd I played up the unreality of the place and made it more theatrical - as written, only a small subset of the people there are actually "real" and the whole setup is there for the Dark Powers to torment the major...

For a magic system designed for this purpose, this is certainly something that can be answered. Perhaps combat magic is powered by the emotions generated by deadly conflict and there is no way of replicating this outside of fights to the death. Perhaps combat magic is provided by entertaining...

I know you are a strong proponent of the idea that players can be trained into certain behaviours by their experiences and I wonder if this is reflected in this - at least in part. In many games, "being good" just gives better rewards - it was a bit of a trope in BG1/2 for example that turning...

I wonder a bit if there's also an aesthetic component to this - basic stat boosting items will fit with basically every player's vision of their character but something like the headless helmet might not fit with some player's vision of their character. Even something as fairly simple as a...

This is generally true, but as the DD example shows it can rely on how strict those requirements are to determine the scale of the impact compared to other things in the game. If I'm limited in what I can carry, but that capacity is large enough that I'll be able to cover all largely...

One of the most compelling inventory management systems I've seen comes in the computer game Darkest Dungeon - for those unfamiliar it's a cosmic horror dungeon crawling game where the player manages a roster of heroes, choosing 4 each week to traverse procedurally generated dungeons to recover...

Isn't this essentially WHFRP's Fate Points?

Do you know what IMO stands for?

You can argue quite well that this is essentially already what goes on - the PC is hit by a sword, which will normally kill or maim someone. The GM rolls and determines how many hit points it'll cost the PC to not be killed or maimed (this is termed a "damage" roll). If the PC can't afford the...

In the same way that overland travel, time spend socialising and so on do not happen in initiative order, we just recognise that the combat engine does not handle all scenarios. Some things just don't need to be handled mechanically via the combat engine and can be handled purely through...

Yes, absolutely - and that narratively powerful entities would often still be modeled with a single hitpoint Oh, my 1st level commoner arms are testament to that and giving Her Ladyship medicines. I certainly wasn't in danger of my life though.

Which patron mechanics specifically?

Right, the alternative way to look at this is that most things should be minions and that having hit points is the unusual factor. Take tabletop Warhammer (including 40k) Most entities have a single Wound and are taken out with a single solid hit. A genetically engineered super-solider has 2...

I'm interested - let's say I come up with a new class, in which I splice the Sorcerer's narrative (which is barely linked to it's mechanics, generally) to the Warlock's mechanics (which is barely linked to it's narrative, generally). Would this suffice for your needs? Is there anything...

While I think your overall point is fine, it's worth considering confounding factors with this - a typical MMO player will probably be spending most of their play time in non-group content and the tank and healer roles are really only needed for group content. Leveling, farming and so on are...

I think it could be done with 3e era psionics, something like this

I think that's basically the point - a TPK doesn't have to kill a campaign - there are lots of plausible outs for this that let a game keep going, but in @EzekielRaiden 's experience, TPKS do kill campaigns. I'll attest to that too - I've seen it happen. I've also seen it not happen after a...

Generally true, but it's still often worth thinking about how you could have done things better.

The general case of this appears to be pretty straight forward - we are having fun with friends, but some mistake leads to us having less fun than we could have had - a frustrating diversion on a road trip where we don't come away with a funny story would be a simple example. For an RPG...

Could you give an example of one of these? I'd be very interested in a worked example of the kind of thing that handles this well