Recent content by EzekielRaiden

If someone else hadn't made the joke, I was going to.

Whereas, despite being a GM, I approach it almost purely from a player perspective. I'm a player. I want my choices to matter. When my choices don't matter, I feel frustrated. If I'm in a situation where it feels like I am bound to one and only one path, I will feel like my choices don't...

Whereas I find that character death makes players entirely check out of the game. "Oh, my character can just die randomly despite my full effort? Okay, no point investing, I'm going to lose it, so I should never get attached." They'll act out, goof off, and otherwise be disruptive or misbehave...

While I understand that you see character death as absolutely necessary for any actions to have any meaning, there really are other perspectives. As someone who appreciates those other perspectives, I often feel frustrated by the disparaging terms used for such things. It's more complicated than...

It should be! Like this is genuinely one of the few areas where 5e did just...straight-up copy 4e's homework without alteration. And then people chose to run it in a much less interesting way, for reasons that defy my ability to understand or explain.

There is a prophecy. She's specifically prophesied to be "wed" to a monster that even the gods fear. (Which is what Eros is; he can, after all, yank around Zeus like a chew toy.) So...the Fates are writing prophecy...which means they control it...

Well, "cannot die", but also "cannot live" either. That's why making it to the surface always results in you getting kicked back to the House. You can't survive on the surface anymore because you are bound to the House, even more than dear old Dad.

I cannot speak to what the designers themselves intended, at least for most editions. But I can say, at least for me, I prefer it when they are much more than that. Which is one of the reasons why 4e's skill philosophy (separately from its design) is by far my favorite of any edition. Because...

In fact, I'm pretty sure there are multiple times when one or more deities commandeer an oracle in order to shape the world to have the result they want. IIRC, Venus/Aphrodite specifically directs the Oracle at Delphi to tell Psyche's (unnamed) royal parents to sacrifice her, meaning she quite...

It always surprises me how people can think that this isn't cheating. "Oh, sure, there are numbers and rules, I just break them whenever I feel like it."

As a general rule, I wouldn't call them an "afterthought", as that implies they're unimportant, but I do think that monsters generally follow from setting conceits, rather than the other way around. Even in cases where a monster is used as a seed element early on, I find it's usually because the...

It seems to me the distinction is, at the very least, much finer than you're implying. Being able to induce the world to magically be what you want it to be is, in a sense, predicting what it will be.

Your argument is, "If we allow X, then that will mean people ask about Y, and then Z, and then W, and then P, and then Q, and then R (etc.), so we cannot allow X." That is a slippery slope. It's one of the most classic examples thereof: "Well if we allow kids to dance, then they'll start doing...

This is a slippery-slope argument. It does not actually demonstrate what you wish to demonstrate.

Then I remember the thread rather differently. As in, essentially the opposite. I have not seen this. I would appreciate the same in return, then. As that has, also, not been my experience. Okay. It would be cool to talk about strategies for how to fix things, then, rather than presuming that...