My philosophy was/is basically that I'm a nobody, but I like doing this sort of thing in my free time, and I've been doing this sort of thing since the '90s. I love making monsters. Let me throw together a few good examples of what I can do, post them PWYW, and let those freebies sorta help me...
Letting PCs get a 30 in their primary stats gives them the same DCs and attack bonuses as stat-capped CR 30 monsters, so I don't see it as too big of a deal. By the time a PC gets their primary stats from 20 to 30, they're functionally 25th-level. If they just bump their Con and their primary...
Protagonists are the center of the action, so you can't prevent the players from occupying that space in the narrative of the game dynamic. That's like asking if you'd play a game without players.
Seconded. I'm looking forward to the Guild's impact on the way we interact with each other and with the game. Something akin to how the OGL changed the way the fanbase interacted with the game in 2000, but now being fully digital, and way more granular.
Armor could just grant "armor hit points" akin to temporary hit points, except critical hits bypass them and deal damage directly to your normal hit points.
Light armor: +3 (1d4) per character level or CR
Medium armor: +4 (1d6) per level per character level or CR
Heavy armor: +5 (1d8) per level...
I think you could get away with most of what you want by bumping the DC for repeated saving throws by +5, making it harder to shrug off of you fail the initial save but not screwing a PC for 10 rounds if they roll low once.
a) yes
b) dynamic combat effects derived from penalties other than mere hit point attrition. it's nice to see combat swing on something other than abstract hp totals.
c) the roll is the roll. body shots tend to happen more often as a matter of course, so I don't mind it.
d) to date, I allow...
I have (or rather, had, up until a jaw-dropping TPK in the Gallery of Angels in OotA) a similar situation with a player in my group using an Oath of Vengeance Paladin to justify basically doing whatever the hell she felt like justifying at the time. I had plans to strip her of her subclass and...
Beyond establishing a very low-magic setting, I can't imagine a single good reason to do this. If you limit cantrips in a way that's got any impact whatsoever, you're just offloading the action economy for spellcasters onto their equipment. Unless a wizard shooting a crossbow rather than a...
Any DM who doesn't call the occasional audible is straightjacketing themselves into every mistake they might have made in the design phase for the encounter at hand.