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Because if you try to simulate the mental skills of the character then very quickly these will need to overrule or supplant the choices of the player, reducing the player to an observer of the character which would actually be controlled by the dice or game rules or the referee.

Because eventually if you follow that logic the player ceases to be the player of the character and becomes the observer. If you simulate the character too much, then the character starts making the choices. Perfect simulation is not only not possible, it's not desirable. Generally speaking...

Not sure about the rest of the thread, but I don't mean any of those things. A tell is best illustrated by the scene in "Monty Python's Holy Grail" where the knights have been told about a terrible beast and they get there and it's just a rabbit. But the "tell" here is "My god man look at the...

I went back and read Lanefan's contributions, and I think you are misreading him. Lanefan plays a game that is like mine bizarrely his own mechanically, but as far as his GMing recommendations go he and I seem to be in agreement on this topic (and in the exact area that I also agree with The...

Things are bad if I think you are too wordy. No, I really don't like his writing. I think he seems like he'd be an A+ GM, assuming he's not actually as pretentious as he comes off as in his schtick. I just hate his "I've Watched too Much of the Critical Drinker" writing style. I don't think...

I hope you aren't too offended if I am not that impressed with The Angry DM. There are a lot of nuggets in his essay that are important, but the way he presents them makes it easy to take the wrong lessons and hides the important take aways amongst all the rest. Aside from his "shtick" of...

Yes, but also no. An area with traps should have an early tell or else be the sort of place where you would expect to have a trap. Once in a "trap filled area" it becomes no longer necessary to telegraph the trap heavily. You don't need a pile of bones around the locked chest in the evil...

Game balance is the juncture of two ideas. That everyone at the table should have fun and that the game is a social game and that the most fun overall is had when everyone is playing. And without game balance, too often too much of the time someone isn't playing. In the case of the dragon...

It occurs to me from this poll that I need someone that just loves making maps, handouts, props, terrain, scripting VTT and otherwise working in the visual space as like co-DM.

My preferences are: 1) Critical hits or misses must always be confirmed. 10% of rolls shouldn't lead to them. They shouldn't be that common. 2) Critical hits or misses must always be concretely defined. If they can't be concretely defined then they shouldn't happen. Concretely defined means...

I've seen this before too. Players are adventuring on Long Island and they uncover a quote or a book or newspaper article quoting an expert from Arkham, and they immediately decide that the best thing to do is drive up to Massachusetts to interview the professor. On thing that module writers...

I totally get it. There isn't a perfect layout that is going to please everyone. I knew what you were going for, but I'm a developer with a pair of 2560x1440 monitors and if I'm reading a book prefer to read it as a book.

That's pretty good. I could run that and feel pretty comfortable and most of what I'd want to add - like access to a random junk generator or a random book title generator and a few choice bits of things that aren't valuable - isn't something I'd necessarily expect you to waste space on. My...

@ilgatto: I love the work you are doing and the thought you are putting into it, but I continue to insist that you have the wrong goal. You will never make a concrete definitive system out of what is intended only to be loose guidelines. Your thinking is very much 4e or later. The production...

In general, 1 to 2 sessions per level cumulative with level. Leveling should slow down over time and not be the focus of play. Early advancement being quick is OK because it often takes a few levels before a character really feels distinctive and able to fulfill the desired heroic role, but...

@Bill Zebub: I think we can all agree that there are some recipes written primarily to cook and some recipes written primarily to read. The usual internet practice is to bury the recipe itself down below 3000 words of introduction. As for your MapQuest test, I'm 100% the written instructions...

So looking at different examples of what is easy to use, I can't help but wonder if the fundamental problem is simply different parts of the process are unequally difficult for different people based on a combination of natural talents and desired aesthetics. The people who like the bullet...

Well, yes. I don't have a problem with the idea of a zero-prep dungeon. I just think that a lot of the zero-prep dungeons don't feel particularly more zero prep than classic two column formats with condensed stat blocks, small, boxed text and so forth. I don't feel like bullet points...

I would love to get to that but my sessions are often really unpredictable, and invariably I have PCs or NPCs at places I don't expect them to be. Then I have to go look up the encounter location or the front/faction where that NPC is documented, or scroll to the encounter key for somewhere I...

Speaking of my experience, absolutely not. If they'd only been far enough along the Dunning-Kruger curve to recognize that if they wanted to run with little to "no prep" to buy any sort of prepared adventure or campaign to run, they wouldn't have been terrible. Rather, they invariably think...