Recent content by overgeeked

That's why I keep repeating it's not antagonistic. Because a lot of people mistakenly see it that way.

It really is just "it works in practice but not in theory," "I can't do it, therefore no one can do it," and "my preferences are objective facts" on repeat, isn't it?

People have seemed to manage to play RPGs just fine with the referee having these powers. As I said before, it's literally a foundational element of RPGs. The referee has the ability to do these things and it's even spelled out explicitly in the rule books that are seemingly so important. That...

And if you want to gamify disagreements, you can always bust out an Engle Matrix Game.

Some great advice. To me, for players, the best advice is: ask the referee. To me, for referees, the best advice is: go with what makes sense in the fiction. If the fiction is unclear, pick a probability along with a relevant die, and roll. If I'm being honest, that's 99% of the rules you...

Exactly. No matter which way you go, you still have to go through the referee to interact with the world. The referee can still change the rules, ignore the rules, etc. Having a rule on paper is effectively meaningless as the referee can decide whether it's an automatic failure, what the DC...

What you're describing sounds more like a boardgame to me. Never doing anything not explicitly covered by some specific rule in 3000+ pages of rules. Having to memorize or constantly look up rules just to play the game. It quickly becomes too cumbersome to actually play. Or worse, have a...

And here I am living life like it's Monday. Damn.

The monsters in 5E are, frankly, terrible. Just about every single 3PP monster book blows every WotC monster book out of the water. You're better off avoiding WotC referee material than using it. Yep. Martials in 5E get nothing, basically. If you want anything interesting, pick a caster to...

I absolutely love mixing sci-fi and fantasy. Always have. I love the gonzo. That's why I love Mystara. The weirder the better.

Huh. That's the literal opposite of my experience with playing and running 5E for the last decade. Player options are overflowing while there's not much more than "well...good luck" for referees. What is provided for referees, things like challenge rating and monster creation, for example, are...

Exactly so. The referee needs to know the rules, the players don't. The players just need to know what they want to do and state it clearly to the referee. The referee can take it from there. The rules are important. The rules matter. System matters. But it can, and often does, have a negative...

Exactly the same here. We didn't need any rules for those things. We used our own creativity and rolled with it. And as a result those were the most fun, most entertaining, and most memorable bits of gaming we ever had.

Yeah. It's a super weird take. I vastly prefer the lighter touch on rules specifically because that's what the hobby was like back in the '80s when I started. Or at least the games I started with. Those blank places in the rules were wonderful and fantastic. Just like blank places on a map. They...

Wild. Even back-in-the-day, Greyhawk was sold (to me at least), as the toned-down, grounded, more purely medieval fantasy setting compared to Mystara's utterly mad gonzo fest. Naturally I gravitated to Mystara because of that. I'll definitely have to dive into Greyhawk.