Comment on “Clerical Amateur Sage Abilities”

(One more point: is it shallow just to go "wow that's cool, more please Alexis" for many of your posts? Sure. Is your blog the only thing demanding my hard work and thinking? No. Commenting critically on every post that impresses me would be a part-time job with no pay. I'd rather go implement them for my D&D world and that's when I'm actually running.)

Here's something about sage skills: I think sage skills and the trade/price tables (and the maps, which are related to those somewhat) are the best fucking parts of your whole big endeavor. They do exactly what shitty railroader non-hard-working DMs do: pin down the world firmly so that players can (as you have written) not just play but WORK in the world, and be able to predict the outcome of such and such action. Sage skills do this by providing solid real no-bullshitting, no-"questions per day", no-"magic 8 ball" information on the "knowledge landscape" of the game world. They're maps for things that aren't geography, which is why they're Good. Ditto trade tables: they're Good the way maps are, but they do it for money and goods: which in turn leads to understanding of in-world investment, shipping, fucking fiscal policy, building and construction, equpping armies, the list goes on an on.

These and other constructs are the big nail in the coffin, the big middle finger to all the "theories" of DMing that insist on keeping players in the dark, on hiding information, on secrets, on vagueness, on etc. etc. etc. Those are all the methods of people who don't want to think/work hard on what is actually going on in their world (if their incoherent slap-dashes can even be called a world and not just a stage.)