Recent content by Neonchameleon

I'd also say that the quality of games is better now than it has ever been. Both the NSR and the post-post-Forge character driven games are frequently awesome in ways that there hasn't been in any previous period. (For that matter the 10s post-Forge and OSR games were often doing things that...

One of my stock "once per campaign" encounters is mid-high level PCs running into a group of bandits. If they're trying they see the bandits before they are spotted - and once the bandits spot them the bandits all decide "Nope. Not messing with that". It's a five or ten minute aside and just...

What makes 5e scaling hella weird is that this isn't the case. The level 20 barbarian might have been at the Conclave of Treachery, waded through the Demonweb Pits to headbut Lolth in the face, and saved Mystra's divinity - but does not mechanically know a single thing more about religion or...

That is a big part of the real underlying complaint, yes. That the DM actions aren't meeting the expectations the player signed up to the game with. The promise of TTRPGs that makes them in many ways superior to e.g. CRPGs despite being far slower and having far worse graphics is that you can...

That and how you did it. A wide area dimensional lock would have been less invasive and less disrespectful of their character's agency and competence than stealing small objects off their persons.

What does "never that big" even mean? Out of potential attacks on one character? A single multi attack encounter power means a multi attack per 3-4 round fight. That's a lot. Character optimization isn't concerned with what ought to be the baseline. It's concerned with what actually is the...

Oh, indeed. I wasn't the one who brought up Expedition 33 however.

Pretty much. The one time I have felt railroaded in a CRPG was Mass Effect 3 - and that's because the Mass Effect franchise's previous installments had lead me to expect much more freedom. CRPGs can't create NPCs on the fly the way TTRPGs can; they are different genres. And we don't say Sandbox...

Many railroaded adventure paths are set up that way. And many Computer RPGs. I'm trying to think of a single RPG system that does this.

Player expectations and play style. My players know I do a lot in the moment - the world is collaboratively built and they have been known when I asked about religion in their home region because the PCs were visiting there to drop an actually present God on me and have me roll with it. This...

No. It is a film. It fails utterly to be an RPG because you are passive observers and the game element is entirely absent. To me the railroad can bite in the first story/module if it is heavy handed, but it normally bites in the second story/module. To use a Star Wars as RPG example assuming...

The thing is that you're moving the goalposts from "stolen from the PCs, especially in an invasive way with no respect for precautions taken or expected to be taken by the PCs" to the more general case of "find and retrieve quests". Find and retrieve quests are still around. But the specific...

To me there's complexity of inputs and complexity of outputs. D&D 3.X maximises the complexity of inputs. You've 32 skills plus four skill categories (craft, profession, knowledge, perform), lots of individual modifiers including stat modifiers, skill ranks, and so many difficulty modifiers...

I couldn't disagree more here. Due to the lack of unified systems and mechanics mechanics even B/X is two 3s in a trenchcoat before spells and spell-less AD&D at least three before we root through the DMG. (And 40% of every pre-4e PHB was spells). And Fate? It depends which Fate. 2000s Fate was...

And in my experience it is one that has been mostly deservedly left in the dustbin of history or at least for the greenest of groups or for things that aren't actually possessions of the PCs (like people or public objects). Because the oldest learned behaviours of players start with things like...