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I've always had a soft spot for True Sorcery.

You might like Trespasser? It's got a much more character ability forward combat setup than most OSR games, but a thoroughly explicated exploration and base-building system built around resource management. I'm very impressed with the gameplay loop of founding a Haven, then planning journeys to...

While trying to find a reasonable priced copy of the textbook Characteristics of Games (George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield & K. Robert Gutschera) on the back of a talk referencing it that left me very interested, I ran into Games: Agency As Art by C. Thi Nguyen and I have never been more...

Well now you're into the toolbox vs. self-contained genre option. Personally, I would much prefer a game that is internally consistent enough to support a singular rules derived setting (or set of setting norms). Changes to that setting would then prompt rules changes, perhaps guided by some...

I think you're catastrophizing a little here. There's usually a little more going on, particularly in a gaming situation where setting is the responsibility of one party. If the point is to present a well-realized, internally coherent setting to the players to interact with, setting limitations...

That looks a lot more to me like the problem was the monster not having the same number of actions as the party. And as he calls out in the beginning of the post, was viable because the party didn't have any action denial options. Plus, the problem that's really being solved here is "how do we...

I've come around to making both critique and design in RPGs much more explicit about design goals. We waste a lot of time on "this was designed badly" when we mean "I want this goal to inform the design." It's frankly a more frustrating conversation, because the rebuttal is usually just "I don't...

I get it, I'm still baffled that you can publish an RPG without a skill system, and then people will think it has a skill system (ironically something 5.5 took the tiniest of steps towards changing), but I think that's down where individuals have indexed. @TwoSix is right to call out these...

Well, that's kind of exactly it, isn't it? Fiction as a constrain on design, vs. a tool to explain the design. The problem with D&D's toolbox nature and long history is that the anchoring on which fiction is constraint and which fiction is irrelevant are super variable from user to user. Really...

To be fair (and acknowledging we have to give a lot of grace if someone was basing a sim perspective on 5e to begin with), the complaint isn't adversarial, it's about inclusion; why was my design goal not worth the complexity? It's not that someone else put some part of the gameplay experience...

I do wonder if there is a model of RPG play in there somewhere, where we remove direct player to PC control, in favor of a more explicitly shared party. The gameplay loop underlying creating and executing a shared plan is obviously present either way, but making it much more explicitly the basis...

I'm not describing "negotiation" in the game, I'm describing the core gameplay loop of negotiating with the GM; player proposes an action, GM proposes a DC and/or range of possible effects, GM describes what actually happens after dice are rolled. Ideally everyone discussed what would happen...

I'd love to see RPGs in general and D&D in particular turn away from negotiation as the basic interaction mechanic, but we haven't had a fully fleshed out skill system for nearly 20 years. I think the player muscle for leveraging rules that way is just gone; players who came into the game with a...

To be fair, no one is really trying. I think it's still very possible to back engineer a set of design principles that make characters "mundane" and there's space to control what high level magic can do. Probably not in removing top-end spell effects, but in separating them across classes or...

I mean the real problem has always been that a bunch of magic is relegated to plot enabler/deus ex machina in fantasy literature, and the wizard is explicitly written as the source of those abilities in D&D. High level magic is setting deforming and does crowd out a lot of the narrative power...

They were scattered throughout several books, notably the "Races of X" line, and allowed you to swap class features at a given level for some specialized alternative. I particularly remember the Shifter druid dropping the animal companion for a floating ability score bonus and extra spells/feats...

I mean, I'm firmly in camp "we wrote 300 page books about it, you can read them." But also, that's honestly fine, as long there are answers. It's one thing for a player's expectation to not align with an outcome, it's quite another for there not to be a knowable rule that set the outcome, and...

I think this is on point. It does not matter whether the proposed setting truths resemble reality, and it's a mistake to look for more authority in that resemblance. That's substituting the inspiration for a given system for system itself. The point is to then be able to reason about the...

I don't think so. Having the same information as the character, roughly the same incentives as a player and the character and making decisions accordingly is as far as it gets. Authorship does not imply shared incentives, and may imply information beyond what the character has access to. I can...

I don't think that's relevant to the immersion question; the goal there has nothing to do with what the output of the character is, just the subjective experience of the player. Why should it matter to the player how well-modeled the character's mental state is, so long as they feel like they're...