Recent content by Swanosaurus

The difference is mainly that if you want to introduce three or four new ancestries, and each one has to come with an inciting event (a bunch of them just recently came over from another continent or plane and stuff like that), then you end up with a highly disrupted status quo. If you just say...

Nope ... neither "walking around everywhere" nor "suddenly", that's just the point. A whole new ancestry coming from another continent? That's "suddenly", and I can see that disrupting a setting. Learning that in the mountains, there are reclusive giant people called goliaths and maybe seing one...

TBH, that kind of "cool" sounds like the most artificial way to go about it. Just do what's most organic, which would probably be "they were always there" and interweave it a bit with what was known before. Way less intrusive than suddenly having visitors from an unknown contint never heard of...

If we limit the discussion to D&D-adjacent, probably this. If not, "classic" is whatever and however you played back then. If a game is doing "classic Fighting Fantasy but with a modern design", that probably means having only one core stat and pretty much the most unified and simplistic...

If I understand correctly, the world of Oerth hasn't been fully described - so maybe the Dragonborn come from, I don't know, from the country of X on the continent of Y? I'm not saying that they will do it right or respectfully; I can't know that. But I don't really get why introducing new...

Okay, I'm speaking as someone who knows next to nothing about Greyhawk - but from what I've read here, it sounds like it's always been a broad strokes setting. So if it hat magic wielders, why would Warlocks and Sorcerers be a problem beyond "they were always there, we just haven't seen them...

You are not wrong about your need for rules. You are wrong about my need for rules. Because I actually don't care about shotguns beyond the worst unrealistic tropes about how shotguns function, I have no need for a rule that produce believable shotgun results. If you care about these things, I...

Okay, at this point, I don't even remotely understand what you're saying anymore or if you're saying anything at all ... I'll leave it at that you're obviously a very experienced GM and should continue with what you're doing, because it seems to work for you. As I will, however inferior and...

... and that is based on your previously uttered notion that "if there's no rule for something, the players usually won't even think of trying it", which, as far as my experience goes, is just not a general truth. As far is I can see, this is the whole extent of the misconception at work here.

Yes, exactly, but the choice what trade-off is best for you is individual to you and your group. I just take issue with the stance of "if you think you're better of with your 100-page system, you're deluding yourself, because this system is LACKING!" In any case, the granularity of the system...

There's a difference between encyclopedic elements and rules procedures that is important. The stats for a bulette are a set of numbers I feed into a system that I already know and have understood. A sub-system is something that I have to learn and understand to use it.

I'm actually really bad at that. I'm fine with winging something by using a simplistic solution; but I hate following a more complex procedure not really knowing if I actually understand what I'm doing. (That's why doing my tax declaration is such a nightmare to me.)

Well, as soon as a subsystem is needed, I'll have to look it up, read and understand it - at least if I want to use it. Either I have to do it preparing a session (investing my time), or, if I didn't know it would come up, I would have to halt the session to read up on it. To me, this seems like...

Of course you couldn't replicate that experience with just some theatre of the mind and a basic resolution system; if you want a system that gives you highly detailed resolutions of epic battles, that is what you want and you should use a system that provides it. That's perfectly fine. But that...

Okay, first of all sorry for the snark regarding knowing other systems than D&D. It's just that I feel that D&D is particularly bad at the whole "core resolution mechanism" thing; there wasn't one until 3rd edition, and I feel that until this day, it never really got the hang of it as well as a...