Recent content by TwoSix

Doing things that make sense isn't the goal. The goal is to craft an interesting story. It's hard to create an interesting story around a character who always makes the most rational, pragmatic decision possible. I mean, you tell anecdotes about your characters, or others in your group...

And I disagree with this. To me, this seems like a pretty obvious poor use of the word. If you create a definable metric of behavior that you could at least describe to someone else (even if you haven't yet), that's OK. But you can't be "faithful" to whatever decisions you might make in the...

You can do that; you just can't call it faithful. Being faithful to your headcanon doesn't count. If you've made external declarations as to how you're attempting to portray the character, than that's fine. It doesn't have to be a mechanic. But it can't just be in your head.

Not wild at all. You can obviously roleplay however you want. But you can't call it a faithful portrayal without being able to measure it against something to be faithful to. I'm not arguing about the play, I'm arguing about the terminology.

No. You can’t faithfully portray a character without some sort of metric to measure that portrayal against. “I’m faithfully portraying the headcanon I have” doesn’t meet that standard. It’s a semantic distortion.

I don’t want to get into a game of dueling anecdotes, but that hasn’t been my experience. Even the people using the new rules I’ve talked to are more in the camp “Oh, there’s some good changes” rather than “this is exciting.”

The boundary between "I'm an expert" and "I know more than you" in presentation is blurry and often dependent on the relative confidence and security of the receiver just as much as the intent of the presenter. I know I haven't read everything Baker has written, but nothing I've read has come...

It's easier than you think!

The generally frigid reception to 2024's overall banality allows me to keep hoping.

Agree to disagree. :)

It might be because my tables are made up primarily of other DMs, but if we see someone make a rules mistake, we call it right out. The idea that it would be considered snitching or as something done as expressly antagonistic to another player isn't even something we would consider.

I mean, I care because it's fun to imagine a world where WotC implodes and chaos reigns in the TTRPG market.

That might be Occam's razor for this specific use case where we know extra details, sure. (Although if we have to start adding a bunch of details, we're kind of ruining the idea of Occam's Razor. :) ) As a general rule, seeing multiple high-level individuals leave fairly quickly from any...

Which is probably why these conversations are so often laced with incredulity.

So you're basically saying that a character making a diegetic statement about the campaign setting that already hasn't been introduced is player authoring? Do you really not do that? That's just play. That's how I've played D&D for 30 years.