I think what it comes down to is the difference between games and real life is that games are 100% driven by your brain. Yes, your character can do things you can't through the magic of dice. But also, the more thinking that gets offloaded to dice, the less engaging the game actually is. It eventually degrades into engaging every situation in terms of character sheet mechanics (in X situation roll a die against Y skill), and then players are dumbfounded if they run into something that can't be engaged that way. Roll to Solve Puzzle isn't solving a puzzle. It's noticing there's a puzzle, picking the player who has the largest Solve Puzzle bonus, and rolling.
Yeah its a definite balancing act.
Another example I would like to use would
"Party is trying to convince the king to do something or otherwise suck up to royalty"
So lets say we're doing a generic "select relevant ability to action, d20 roll-under the score after modifiers" to adjudicate.
Now obviously "I charm the king.... 14 to roll under my charisma" is straight out.
But I'm going to give two examples where I'd let the player get a lot of flex.
First is, if that player is just wrecked by life. Long week, bad day. They are otherwise solid on the roleplaying, they are just having an off night and their brain isn't working, and they are asking for mulligan. I'm going to give them the option of turning things over to the dice & the gm. I'm still going to make the player provide a general description, a "ChatGPT prompt" if you will, of what they want to say, what they don't want to say, and if they know/remember any specifics to help them out. The better this is, the more likely the dice will favor them.
now if this is an EVERY TIME it won't fly. But I've had days where work has done temp INT and WIS damage, and the game is supposed to be fun not work.
Second is if the player says something to the effect of "I want to see if I know anything relevant of the kingdom and noble traditions" and that shit hasn't come up or been put into background information. Basically they are 100% relying on abilities and knowledge their character has and it would be difficult/impossible/overly autistic to convey that stuff to the player.
Another example is avoiding "Puzzle Solving via dice" but also respecting "My 18INT wizard should be smarter than me". Which is I'll usually let players do an INT check to get a solid puzzle hint in most case, depending.
But again, I don't view any of this as contradicting "the answer isn't on your character sheet"; the players shouldn't have access to any of the tables or numbers.
That is definitely an interesting, um, interpretation of a lich.
My take has always been that liches are the result of an obsession carrying a spellcaster (usually a wizard, but not always) beyond death's grasp. Maybe they have a desire for power or an all-consuming ambition. Maybe they've locked themselves into a drive for revenge or an obsessive need to collect things.
Regardless, liches are rarely (if ever) sane things, and crazy people who wield reality-twisting powers are just bad fucking news.
In my games, creation of Phylactery involves performing deeds so evil and heinous that you lose your soul and are denied even hell. Basically mortal power at the cost of everything.
I borrow from Egyptian legends about Set (who is defeated but always killed; Evil always manages to return) and a bit of.... I don't know what you'd call it, philosophy? Of someone's name & reputation being linked to an event combined with how people tend to lose themselves to the pursuit of power.
Hitler would have qualified for lichhood. (I mean, if the holocaust had been real of course) Genghis would have had a phylactery.
But OSR also likes to pretend everyone already owns a copy of the AD&D GM guide. Most of these games are sold primarily in PDF via online download. You aren't paying my internet bill the least you can do is add the 2 extra pages of relevant information like Appendix A if that is what you intended to be used with your game. I shouldn't need to open 4 different books written in the 1980s to figure out your "vision" of tabletop. What a turbo narcissistic take from the OSR community.
Any system will have lazy "Me too!" add ons. And you have nailed one of the sins of low-effort OSR lampreys, namely they aren't a complete system but then don't provide the GM the relevant or appropriate system.
Who ever it was (I think
@Adamska) who said that alot of stuff purporting to be OSR is "vibe design" and that is massively accurate. And as you touch on, People tend to focus overly on "appendix N" and forget the others.
Many OSR games don't even respect the old weapon types vs armor types tables despite always claiming BECMI heritage.
A lot of the more austistic tables I view as not something to be used regularly, but
Though types v. armor is a bad example as that should be used more regularly. But I would again argue that players, except maybe the fighter, shouldn't have access to that table and if they do have access it shouldn't have numbers.
Counter counter point: GM does not need to act. He can decribe the expressions, the voice tone, ject, mimics, the fear in his eyes etc. vividly. GM's can express many things with descriptions. You can describe a a room with a shelf that sratches underneath. Players can deduce there might be a secret door, and try it and find it immidiately, complately ignore it, or if they search for a secret door without pointing out they are checking the door, they would find it eventually but there is a chance that they might attract a random encounter. this stuff is very easy to do and i am not saying that you should always do it narratively and expect your players to find them. Sometimes it is easy to use dice but if you lack perception skill, the dice would be a dice of chance, or of an attribute and when it is not a skill, players are less inclined to demand a roll all the time.
I prefer to not roll diplomacy, intimidate, perception and insight rolls in my games and the best way to do it is OSR. ACKSII is a good system but sadly i had imbiciles as players so i started a new game with PF1e rulesset and i am half suffering because of it. Everything feels arcade and my friends complain about how none of the abilities of the classes are not heroic show off abilities lel.
As
@LovisXVI says, that doesn't always work. If you describe something with more than a single adjective, players will assume its important and glom to it.
