Recent content by EzekielRaiden

My point is and has always been, as I originally said, that the conclusions folks almost always draw from the experiment, and the claims people make about exactly what happened during the experiment, are almost always overblown and, generally speaking, presented in a way that is outright...

Certainly, y'know, given how "A review of Milgram's research materials suggests that the experiments exerted more pressure to obey than the original results suggested. Other variations of the experiment revealed much lower rates of obedience, and many of the participants actually altered their...

To really engage with what you are describing, you'd need a classless system--so that everyone could in fact use the same rules. It is precisely the fact that D&D wants a class-based system and wants NPCs who only appear once and wants everyone to work by precisely the same rules 100% of the...

Completely agreed. Who is saying this? I might've missed it on later pages (there's like 120 posts I haven't read yet...) but nobody on this forum advocates such a position as far as I can tell. I sure as hell wouldn't.

As with most rules structures, it is an abstraction with only an approximate correspondence to the world itself. Sometimes, it is worthwhile going to the effort to tighten that approximation so that the two are nearly (if not actually) identical. Often, however, it is not worth putting in that...

As with the Stanford prison experiment, the stuff people say about the Milgram experiment is often HORRIFICALLY mis-quoted, inaccurate, or even straight-up wrong. So, while I don't mean to pick on you personally for this one, I'm gonna have to tear into that quite a lot because this reflects...

The problem isn't that it means different things to different people. It's that WotC's chosen design method for 5e is design-by-committee, just via survey. When there's a clear agreement about what something should be in broad strokes, e.g. everyone agrees Druids should have shapeshift (but...

So we should thus roll out the red carpet and bend over backwards to help them be jerks, rather than lift a finger to do better? No. Rules are not the horrible boogeyman you make them out to be, and absolutely can make a HUGE difference in both player and GM behavior. We can, should, and must...

That you keep bringing up how much the books empower the GM to be a jerk "if [they are] that kind of person" does not bespeak of such a thing. Instead, it makes it sound like you are extremely keen to ensure that the rules stay that way--keen to ensure that the rules always make abundantly clear...

Given my color assignments above, I'd say I pegged things pretty damned well. I put Sorcerer in Green instead of Blue because, while they use arcane magic, it's in the blood. That's pretty much directly what Green is about: accepting what is just naturally the case and following where it leads...

And you wonder why I take the view I take on your posts. Should do the respectful and positive thing, not have to--every GM always has the right to be a huge jerk at any time and for any reason!

These are just classes. Subclasses, there's too many and they're too likely to make major changes (e.g. Celestial Warlock is 100% White, not Black, because the whole point is that it inverts the usual concept of the class.) Listed in alphabetical order, NOT order of greatest importance. Blue...

Rarely if ever. Especially if I do the Fighter 1/Warlock N route, since that gives weapon mastery access. Greatsword's Graze mastery is simply too good to pass up.

But by that same token, the GM is not a unilateral voice either. Despite the many (many...many...) claims to the contrary, the player and GM have to actually come to an agreement between them. A consensus, if you will.

I apologize for contributing to it moving in that direction. I do think it's...going to be pretty hard to avoid having it come up in this thread specifically, given the question of what GMs should do with patrons, and whether those patrons should be punitive to their warlocks if said warlocks...