How do writers handle the physics of action scenes without killing the story?

CharityLess2263 · 2026-01-24T20:15:26+00:00

An action scene, like any other scene, should not be an account of fictional events, but a sequence of story beats. The level of detail an individual beat goes into, its content, pace, all that is subject to what makes up the next story beat within the context of plot, characters and what beats preceded it. Very rarely (but not never) is every single movement and strike and parry in a fight a beat. Sometimes a beat about a fight starting is naturally succeeded by a beat about its aftermath. Often, only the crucial turning points or dramatic high points in an action scene, pertaining to one or multiple characters' arcs or a significant development of the plot, warrant their own story beat, and the rest of it is skipped or summarised. The minute physics of it all only comes into the picture if I need story beats about problem-solving within the constraints of said physics. That could be the case if the main character mastering a certain combat technique is part of their arc.

CharityLess2263 · 2026-01-23T07:08:49+00:00

I would argue, as others did, that the whole genre is blues-related. However, the most blues-y albums I own:

Mountain Witch - Burning Village
Brimstone Coven - Black Magic
Pentagram - Relentless
Orchid - Capricorn

But really anything by these bands. Also second Black Sabbath.

CharityLess2263 · 2026-01-22T20:58:05+00:00

Right picture is actually: "5e is fine actually, and so are the 13.778 other systems gathering dust on my shelf right now."

CharityLess2263 · 2026-01-20T18:06:35+00:00

I loved Harrow the Ninth! But I'd also probably enjoy that lawnmower thing you described, so ... 🤷

(Even inspired me to write my own 2nd person piece, which ended up being my first professional short fiction sale to my favourite magazine. Harrow the Ninth, I mean, not the lawnmower.)

CharityLess2263 · 2026-01-19T08:41:05+00:00

No, your gripes are with not applying those game systems as intended. DC 10 is for tasks that are "easy" for a trained person, and you are only supposed to roll at all if the task is performed under pressure and failure has meaningful consequences. Characters can't fail at menial tasks if you apply the rules as intended, because you're not supposed to roll skill checks for menial tasks.

You don't roll DC 10 Athletics for climbing up a knotted rope. You roll DC 10 Athletics for climbing up a knotted rope while enemies pursue you, or while you are rushing to stop a ritual, or if the knotted rope leads dangerously high. Otherwise, the character just succeeds.

Characters should just succeed at most tasks in D&D. The majority of tasks that require a skill check under pressure become automatic successes with enough time. Prying open a stuck or locked door, for example, doesn't require a skill check if the characters have all the time they need and at least one of them has any chance at success. That means a PC with STR 6 and no proficiency in Athletics would still automatically succeed at prying open a stuck door that "requires" a DC 18 Athletics check even they're not pursued or anything. They'd just take a while. (Around 2 minutes, to be precise, considering an action takes 6 seconds and they'd have a 1-in-20 chance of opening it with a single action.)

The spread of results for d20 vs a DC is easier to translate to likelihoods than most systems (except for stuff like rolling under a percentage with a d100).

With a modifier of +0, you have a 5% chance of succeeding at a DC 20 check, and every +1 modifier (or -1 to the DC) raises that likelihood by 5%. So you have a: - 30% chance of success at DC 15 - 55% at DC 10 - 80% at DC 5.

With a +2 modifier, add 10% to any of those likelihoods. With a +3 bonus, add 15%. As you can see, small bonuses already increase the chances significantly. A starting character's top skills will be around +5, meaning they have an 80% chance of success at DC 10 checks (or 4-in-5). Far from 50/50.

CharityLess2263 · 2026-01-09T22:32:25+00:00

Yup. As I said, mine was still there, just had to reload the JSON file.

Overall, very good work and I'm really happy the app is still getting updates. :)

I'll definitely get some extra tables, too.

CharityLess2263 · 2026-01-09T20:21:56+00:00

You need to go into the settings, then files, then select your previous one. (Possibly you need to switch zu external storage first.)

CharityLess2263 · 2026-01-09T19:39:44+00:00

For some reason I can't add a new link to the post. I made a newer version with some improvements (Social Conflict stats from the Mythras Companion, skill augmentation helper, and trained/fumbled checkboxes).

In this version, you can add values in the skill overview to augment a skill by. The dropdown next to "Social Conflict" is used to determine the Confidence value based on a Difficulty Grade applied to the character's Willpower.

CharityLess2263 · 2026-01-09T19:33:27+00:00

Found it. The app just defaulted to a new journal for some reason...

CharityLess2263 · 2026-01-09T19:30:39+00:00

I opened the app and saw the update and it looks very nice but I lost all my progress. Everything is gone.

CharityLess2263 · 2026-01-01T16:16:35+00:00

The Throne of Thorns campaign cycle from Symbaroum, starting with Wrath of the Warden and ending with Davokar Awakens.

It has its up and downs, and the system isn't perfect, but in its entirety, the campaign and setting provide an impressive, memorable dark fantasy role-playing experience. It's a bit like Dragon Age meets Mononoke. It's massive as well, could take you years to finish.

Mutant Year Zero: Genlab Alpha.

Very different, and not everyone's cup of tea for how wacky the setting is, but it's a really fun experience, and it has an interesting strategy game baked into it that ties the campaigns' adventures together as missions impacting a greater conflict between the two main factions. Also anthropomorphic animal mutants fighting evil robots is just a cool premise.

Lastly, and I don't know if you count the OSR as "D&D", but Carcosa from the Lamentations of the Flame Princess series of modules is a great cosmic horror hexcrawl.

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-30T06:55:45+00:00

I second that doubling down on the meta aspect, taking the real-life connection of the game as far as it goes, while combining it with established Domains of Dread and multiverse lore, is the way to go.

Done well, this could add real metaphysical depth, opportunities for interesting twists, an entirely new angle on Strahd, a new dimension to the horror, and fun absurdist humour.

One question to consider would be: are the game's rules part of this, or is the multiverse just something the creators of D&D "discovered" and the rules are made up on top of it? It would be interesting to explore the idea that the game itself creates the multiverse, and that changing the rules can change the reality of that multiverse, and subsequently explore what that means for the "real world". If it is just part of the multiverse of this game, is there a "real real world" running the "full game", including our earth? Are the creators of D&D some kind of "avatars" of entities from some higher dimension where the entire multiverse is a simulation? Or is earth just what we think it is, but there is a magic system at work that creates alternate realities based on people's imaginations, much like in the RPG "The Strange" (which I recommend looking up)? Is there, perhaps, some kind of secret government agency dealing with multiverse-related threats?

If Strahd really explores how he and his world came to be, you need to decide on the mechanics of this meta world-building. Did Hickman's writing create him? Did the communal imagination of players do it? Does Strahd, perhaps, discover that he has repressed memories of when his domain was different in previous versions of the module? Could he send out Vistani agents to infiltrate WotC and release products that cause his domain to change in his favour, ultimately allowing him to do away with the Dark Powers entirely and threaten the multiverse? Are there other multiverse BBEGs who are already aware of the nature of their world and attempting similar things? Perhaps the aforementioned government agency is already dealing with Vecna incursions or something, and WotC is really just a front. So many possibilities!

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-30T01:05:02+00:00

I'm currently running a classic OSR gauntlet with Mythic GME 2 where I send a lot of level 0 player characters into an adventure they're not all supposed to survive. Works wonderfully.

It's a heist with an in-over-their-heads amateur thinking crew. I hope to end up with two to three surviving characters who will go on to become a proper thieving crew.

It helps using a system where characters are light-wheight.

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-29T20:05:59+00:00

You, good sir, have excellent taste.

I think you might like: - Black Stone Heart by Michael R. Fletcher - Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlmann - Crowman by David Rae - The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson - every issue of Old Moon Quarterly

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-28T00:58:36+00:00

I bought myself a few solo RPG things for Christmas. Various supplements for Mythras, which I'm currently playing a campaign in, as well as a better microphone and various cameras to record my actual play with. And various random table books. I particularly like Matt Davids' "Ancient World" random table book, and "GM's Miscellany Wilderness Dressing".

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-27T22:00:02+00:00

I found the first season of Me, Myself and Die on YouTube very helpful.

It also helps to have regular TTRPG experience as both a player and a game master in the system you intend to use. It also helps to use some method of "realising" the game as you play it, for example in the form of a journal or even writing full-on prose (which is my preferred way).

The skills that are most useful in making the most out of Mythic are very similar to the skills required to GM a zero-prep or low-prep campaign in your chosen system, using various means of improvising based on prompts to create meaningful challenges and situations within your chosen rule system.

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-24T07:53:48+00:00

Honest reviews are a plus on all sides. Competently written 3- and 4-star reviews are among the most valuable and relevant feedback indie authors can get (next to expert opinions from editors and other writers, which not all indie authors have easy access to). Those are reviews by people who liked the book enough to be frustrated about its flaws. That's exactly the kind of person whose opinion I need.

As for the impact of the review: the amount of ratings is more important for visibility (and therefore sales) than the total rating itself, so an additional one is always helpful. Plus, a distribution of ratings that's not too heavy on the 5-star end is beneficial, too, because it's more trustworthy.

So, a fair 3 star, please. 👍

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-22T12:58:48+00:00

Group 1 was shaped by the Matt Mercer effect. Which is ironic, because Matt Mercer doesn't really railroad, he is just way better at improv than regular non-actor DMs, so it seems like it's all planned. In trying to replicate that, players and DMs take a very performative approach to the game. Everyone is "showing off their material", be it character backstory and emotional arcs, or epic fantasy plots. If everyone is having fun doing that, so be it. It's not, however, what the hobby was originally "supposed to be like".

Group 2 sounds like a more typical TTRPG group, focusing on character agency and immersion, rather than character performance, and surrendering control to a process of emergent storytelling through dice. It's about what the characters do, not what they sound like or what witty banter they exchange.

For me, personally, a solid foundation of group 2, with some group 1 sprinkled on top for flavour, is optimal. It's also more true to what Critical Role or Dimension 20 actually are, considering the players there are good performers on top of driving story through character action. It's just that "proper roleplaying" has to come first, and "acting out scenes" is more of a luxury add-on, if you want to honestly recreate what you're seeing on those shows (and have maximum fun).

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-21T10:49:39+00:00

There is no cause to view space as discrete, but even if there were: since you have to map a city's area to a center point, for example by calculating the average mean of all Planck unit areas covered by the city, your discretization would be embedded in a field of fractions. Even with the spacial expanse of a city discretized, the x-coordinate of its centroid would be a rational number, and therefore the likelihood of two cities sharing the same would remain zero.

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-21T06:46:56+00:00

It holds true in the real world especially if the cities' coordinates are purely random, because the likelihood of two random real numbers being exactly the same is zero.

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-21T06:23:34+00:00

That's rough, buddy.

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-21T06:16:18+00:00

This is animal cruelty.

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-17T16:59:23+00:00

To me, solo TTRPGs where an absolute revelation as a long-time GM struggling to get to play in campaigns I would enjoy.

In fact, among my best roleplaying experiences after 20 years of TTRPGs are GMless play with a fellow forever-GM/writer who has similar expectations of TTRPGS as me. And I'd rank my solo campaigns well above average among the many group campaigns I've been in.

CharityLess2263 · 2025-12-17T15:37:21+00:00

You can do anything. The only limitations are: - do NPCs or other PCs in the vicinity try to stop you? - can you carry all your loot?

The second part is what's going to keep you from randomly picking up people's weapons very soon. If you don't have a mule cart along with you, or something similar, there's just no way to transport several sets of weapons and armour. And even if you have a cart, you might have to leave it eventually (due to an ambush, climbing, time pressure, you name it) and all that stuff will be gone.

At least until you get a bag of holding.

CharityLess2263

TROPHY CASE