Recent content by prabe

As is the tradition in our household, a nigh-miraculous beer instead of sparkling wine. Cheers and all the best for 2026!

If you are wondering if you should leave a TRPG table, you probably should.

It's probably an error to confuse mathematics and numerology.

Says as much about the circle/s of players as it does about the GM, or about the game. Though I suppose after forty-three years there's probably at least some Ship of Theseus stuff happening.

I don't do anything professional on my computer, so my attitude might be different, but I have said that I want my computer to support (in the sense of "make it easier to do more") my hobbies, not to be my hobby.

Yeah, my experience is that if a movie (or novel, or whatever) is set long enough in the past that you're better off just taking any amount of money as meaning what the characters say it does. So an expensive house is an expensive house, for instance. I've head some Hammett and some Chandler...

That's a thing that older editions did, and it's not unreasonable. Somewhere on this site is a long post (that someone else wrote) about classes being balanced by rarity. Given that the edition/s I'm running don't do that, it's not relevant to me.

I don't wildly disagree with you. I'd rather purchase everything out of the same point pool, and setting limits on ability scores does tend to make SAD characters easier to build, and the games that don't have randomly generated ability scores work more than well enough. On the other hand, if...

None of this is really about stat generation, though. It's all about expectations and experiences and preferences.

For your 2) I'm willing to suggest it might be people finding out that what they signed up for frustrates them. I've found myself not much enjoying some games I've signed up for, and it wasn't really a communications breakdown.

If the people with the better stats are frustrated, and the people with the worse stats are frustrated, how can it not be worse gameplay? Or at least, how can it not be a worse experience for the players? (And isn't "better/worse experience" more important than "better/worse gameplay?")

It might feel that way to one or more of the other players at the table, who might feel as though they're carrying some extra dead weight. It's not just the players with the weaker characters who are having less fun, is what I'm saying.

Or maybe not, but if it's still in good shape someone else can plausibly enjoy it.

There are some people who don't like being in someone else's multiquote, which might or might not overlap with there being some people who don't like their posts broken up by sentences (or smaller) and responded to that way.