Once in a blue moon, an impossible check can impress a scale of difficulty on the players.

D&D example: a player with a high bonus attempts an Arcana check to figure out an enchantment and rolls well, up to a natural 20. I let the players have their moment of joy. Then I make a big deal of telling them they don’t have any idea what’s up with this enchantment. I really talk up how weird/complicated/confusing/impenetrable the enchantment is.

I’d be trying to prompt emotions I want the players and PC to share. Frustration, inadequacy. The players would viscerally know they need to try a different approach.

And because I gave the check a decent chunk of game time, it has more narrative weight. An interactive skill check is more substantial in the player’s mind than a monologue on the task being impossible, particularly if it stands out because they fail that check despite a super high result.

It’s a niche scenario, I admit. Most of the time just don’t ask for the check.

Dating back to 3rd critical skill checks in D&D suck because a lot of skills are written as pass/fail.

Example: picking a lock. If we want to add criticals, a 1 breaks the lock; mostly okay, with the long acknowledged fringe problem of experts being incompetent 5% of the time. What does a natural 20 get? I adore opportunities to be creative, but there’s not a lot better than, “You did it perfectly.” A regular success earns that according to the rules, I don’t want to take it away. A speech about how cool and ninja the PC is can come off pretty cringey to me. The correct mechanical answer would be to let the 20 roll over to the next check because the PC’s in the zone or whatever. Not awful, but it doesn’t directly reward the player right when they rolled the 20, which is the occurrence we want to feel good. We’re also rewriting several rules at this point.

Meanwhile, PF2e baked degrees of success into everything. On a crit fail they break the lock, on a fail they leave traces of their fruitless efforts, on a success they get one success toward opening the lock while scuffing it up a little, and on a crit success they get two successes and leave the lock looking pristine. The players don’t feel cheated when they get a normal success and scuff up the lock. The 20 has some reward for most characters. The 1 has a setback, even a reasonable setback for an expert with a +25 trying to open the DC 10 lock on Grandma’s rickety shed.

I actually don’t mind pass/fail skill rolls in D&D or other games. Rolling a 20 is inherently satisfying to me. But I adore the DC+10 critical threshold for making a good build feel like it was time well spent, in or out of game. And since the natural 20/1 and critical rules are connected at the hip, I’ll gladly take them both.

You can’t be evil if you don’t have free will. A tool has no evil except from what comes from the hand that wields it. So to me, orcs make more sense as a constructed organic machine, little better than automatons, and with no moral sense of their own.

Philosophically debatable, but a reasonable perspective. More germane to TTRPGs, I think it’s a legitimately interesting way to frame orcs, both more in line with the original source material (which as you say is nebulous to their origin) and interesting for players and GMs to deal with.

To me it’s so important that different ancestries/creatures be legitimately alien. If I can find a facsimile of an ancestry in real life Earth, it’s not foreign enough that I want an ancestry. I don’t need orcs that are tribal warriors or Mexican, we have Mexico and tribes on Earth. This is one area where Pathfinder and D&D both miss the mark for me… but not Warhammer, where they’re a psychic fungus, or LotR, where they’re test tube mooks.

I’d say that a complete lack of empathy is the defining quality of evil, what drives them to seek power without any care for others.

Definitely a good way to make a villain. But I’m not convinced any one trait makes a good villain! There are a lot of villains who have empathy, across media. Adrian Veidt in Watchmen, Roy Batty in Bladerunner, Lucifer in Paradise Lost, Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. All heroes are alike; each great villain is evil in their own way.

I ran Ravenloft in 3.5 and adored playing Strahd, it’s so fun to twirl the figurative moustache. To me a huge strength of tabletop is that we get to savor things more emotionally vs intellectually compared to other entertainment, since we’re acting it out, and with simple characters you can flat out bathe in it. I don’t play 5e but I would run Ravenloft if it meant getting to run rampant with Strahd again.

Anyone who has never GMed before, believe me, I’ve never found anything like Snidley Whiplashing it up, 22 ounces of fresh cut ham on rye. All the joy of being despicable, none of the culpability.

The root of orcs as we think of them is Lord of the Rings, where they’re corrupted elves (or something like that). Literarily, they represent the evils of war. Tolkien orcs are evil.

Orcs have seen the furthest drift from those roots of anything from LotR. Dwarves, elves, orcs, and halflings saw some drift to generalize them for other tabletop settings. But the traits settled on for orcs in the 90s and 00s (strong, nomadic, clan society, warlike, brutal, noble savage stuff) can now feel insulting, because those traits are so often used in racist contexts, so orcs have seen a second drift away from those, too.

I don’t see much of a point to orcs anymore and don’t use them. Regarding 5e, I haven’t read its finished modern take on orcs but if I want Fantasy Mexico I’m just going to use human Fantasy Mexico.

I do disagree that fantasy villains need motivations beyond existing. Conscience and free will are required for protagonists, optional for antagonists. Illithids, vampires, and early Pathfinder goblins come to mind from fantasy. Strahd’s reason for being a villain is that he’s mopey. Everything in Cthulhu, likewise, lacks comprehensible motivation.

It’s hard to make an inherently evil villain that is a foil to the PC, but not every villain needs to be a foil. As a GM it can be really fun to wallow in a villain being unrepentantly, unthinkingly horrible.

The last few games were awesome. The Super Metroid race was hard to follow, but the runners were a lot of fun together and the finale was incredible.

I like a lot of what GDQ has become.

Online sale have reduced distribution costs and unlimited scaling compared to physical media, so successful games are far more lucrative now than they were and unsuccessful games don’t have losses from overproduction and returns from stores.

Certainly a factor that should be included in determining what a game costs, as is the 30% off the top taken by Steam, Microsoft, and Sony for most digital sales. Distribution in 2023 was not a factor in determining the current max price for a standard edition non-sports game, which was set in the early 00s.

I’m also comfortable seeing games that cost less to produce carrying lower price tags, as in many cases they do, Hades and Hi-Fi Rush coming to mind.

If selling at the current rate wasn’t profitable, gaming companies would have stopped making games by now.

They continue to make $60 games, yes. No one can say whether some company would have made the greatest game of all time last year if they’d been able to sell it for $70, or $80 or $100. Maybe they’re making it now as GTA6.

The economy of scale is what lets companies operate at higher costs. According to Wikipedia RE2 cost about $1 million to make. $1m might still buy a PS1 caliber game, but the remake cost at least an order of magnitude more. Many games now cost nine figures; GTA6 apparently cost $1 billion.

I’m not saying games should haphazardly inflate with everything else for the sake of share holders, but I’m open to the idea that the formula used twenty years ago to decide that AAA games should cost $60 might be out of date.