Recent content by Pedantic

I've had some strange experiences that I think of as "Schrodinger's Mechanic" type play. The game has rules for resolving something, those rules are used sometimes, unless the GM has decided not to use them. There's shades of this in conventional rulesets, "don't roll if the results don't...

The general vibe seems to swing less roguelike-inclined than me here....but surely I'm not the only person deep into Slay the Spire 2? I've ground my way up to A10 on everyone and gotten in a fair amount of multiplayer with my local friends. There's definitely still some kinks to work out this...

How, precisely? Maybe you're proposing kiting as a solution, some method by which you can deal slow damage to an opponent, but they can't take effective actions against you? There's maybe an inflection point with sufficient debuffing it works out, but actions available are the single biggest...

That's really not relevant, unless you've got an extremely high AC or you're dealing with a weird outlier penalty to enemy damage rolls. The impact of giving the enemy more actions to hit you with is going to cause more total damage in nearly every case.

It kind of feels like fudging is some whole other thing. It might be worth exploring what kind of play is best facilitate by a strong fudging culture. It supposes you want randomness only sometimes, and you want it to be secret, and mitigated by the GM in favor of some specific outcome. It feels...

I don't really think CaW/CaS fit neatly along a S/G lines, assuming you're defining "gamism" in terms of player facing mechanical interactions. That feels like it's primarily concerned with how defined player actions are (do they emerge from the player/GM understanding of the world and...

I'll be honest, I've never found the games that get put into the CaS category satisfying on a strict mechanical interaction level, precisely because they tend to be relatively solvable or completely unsolvable: do you have enough time/context to understand what the enemies do and how to make...

This is most easily resolved by just making perception/knowledge defenses. Gated information can have an obscurity modifier the GM rolls against the PC's defense, and then you can just report everything they know outright.

You're basically just working around a smaller atom of actions, right? Like, "1 action" is a useful generic label, but you can express everything in minutes just fine. Sounds like potentially a lot more design work.

This is the kind of play I find most confusing. I personally don't like gambling (narratively or otherwise), but I grasp the general appeal. I struggle to understand what kind of appeal people are finding in gameplay built entirely out of meaningless decisions. My best guess is that's it's an...

I think you're totally right in identifying that as a separate category that gets rolled into "Sport," which I've always found perhaps too vague. I'm not sure the usual split between tactics/strategy is actually that significant. What's really being discussed there is usually just resource...

I think the bolded steps are the place where a well designed skill system can come in and meaningfully change gameplay. The downsides to setting the GM as a designer action to action are generally understood and doing a good job is most of what gets called "DMing technique". Basically, it's...

I'm going after calls for Perception checks/"roll History to understand this mural" but it's certainly defensible to completely remove that element of gameplay.

Knowledge checks: should be defenses; they're ultimately the same thing as perception, and allow players to shift resources from action effectiveness to action planning during character creation. Making them proactive action rolls complicates them, mostly unnecessarily. Sometimes a time cost...

What precisely are you talking about? I've made quite clearly opinion marked points about the design impacts of various choices, and primarily suggested the discourse around resource/logistical engagement doesn't turn on having/not having skills so much as a variety of other factors. I even...