Look man, you live in a strange world of your own where you don't even read the rules of the game you play, but you improvise all the time instead, relying one ONE sentence in the whole rules. This is fine as a playstyle, but the main problem is that it makes it impossible to discuss with you, when you can't even acknowledge that you are ignoring rules on purpose. Improvising is fine, but please don't take us for idiots and try and tell us that you play the game as written and intended at the same time. Examples below:
You are conjuring up differences that don't exist.
I have given you two clear examples of rules which are worded very differently, and yet you continue with this totally unsustained opinion:
4e: When your hit points drop to 0 or fewer, you fall unconscious
and are dying.
5e: If damage reduces you to 0 hit points and fails to kill you, you fall unconscious. This unconsciousness ends if you regain any hit points.
And the fact that, in 5e, there is this supplement to rules about space that exists nowhere in 4e: "A creature's space is the area in feet that it effectively controls in combat, not an expression of its physical dimensions"
Don't even bother answering until you acknowledge that there are differences.
Phasing does not negate grappling. It doesn't even let you end your turn in another creature's space. (MM glossary; RC p 208.)
It's funny that you chose to answer only the part about phasing, but forgot the important rule that you forgot or decided not to apply: "
"Immobilized: Being immobilized doesn’t prevent you from teleporting. If you were immobilized because of a physical effect, such as a creature grabbing you, you can teleport away and are no longer immobilized or restrained, if applicable."
So please stop dithering and answering besides the question, Ygorl, as written, has NO POWER TO TELEPORT A GRAPPLING CHARACTER WITH HIM, and anyone grappling him is left behind when he teleports.
As I posted in the actual play report, Ygorl was teleporting him through the chaos, inflicting damage as a result. That was an improvised action on Ygorl's part.
And here you go. Rather than applying the rules and the powers of Ygorl as written, for the rule of cool at your table, you decided something else. But anyone playing 4e by the rules would have had a completely different result of the encounter. He would have destroyed your party because no one could have immobilised him long enough to be subject to the ritual.
You are not playing 4e, you are playing a wildly different game that you define as you go, but which has little to do with the original concept. You base all of your wild game on one single sentence in a section that does not even mention that, rather than applying all the hard and fast rules of the game, as written.
I can't remember now whether that was an alternative to teleporting away, or whether the PCs had taken some other action to ensure that the grappler remained anchored to Ygorl.
There is no such thing in the rules. 4e grappling rules are very basic because they interfere with the game too much are would be unfair if made stronger (and ignore all other defenses and hit points). Which is what happened in your game, the PCs totally ignored most of the powers of Ygorl, which you did not even play, making him do an improvised action that caused him to lose the fight without relying on his powers. The 4e fans at our tables would be really upset by that anyway, they would certainly feel that the DM fudged in their favor and underplayed the adversary.
Even here you are wrong. The example given is of pushing an ogre into a brazier. Which is neither damage nor a bonus, but forced movement.
And it's funny how forced movement ends up doing damage which scales with level. Why ? What makes that forced movement make more or less damage compared to the level of the character ? Is the brazier hotter because the character is higher level ? This is ridiculous.
You are insisting your interpretation of the game, as fiction-free or else laden with absurd fiction, and unable to handle improvisation, is correct. I am pointing out the rules of the game, which include page 42, and which I used to run a very satisfactory fiction-first game, and you are insisting that I got it wrong, and that the true interpretation is the one that sucks. It's a strange interpretive principle.
No, I'm insisting that you are not playing the game that was designed, as your other friends pointed out to you. Maybe it sucked for you, but having a clear-cut combat game with crystal clear rules was the intent and there were lots of people who liked it that way, including at our usually more story orientated tables.
And these people would have complained about your way of playing the game, ignoring half the rules and most of a creature's powers for the sake of the story, when what they wanted was the actual challenge of beating up the bad guy as written.
I don't think I am using a technical and precise environment in your sense.
No, you are not, which is why I've always said that I would probably have enjoyed your games, with just one thing to overcome for me, it's hard to see the logic of it and to determine what is going to work and what is not, because it all seems to hang only on your arbitration.
If you want to know what I enjoyed about 4e D&D, then you can follow the links in the actual play reports I've linked to in this thread.
I've looked at the play reports, but honestly, I'm not seeing what in 4e you are using that makes you so satisfied. The system is barely recognisable anyway. I've played games of Amber Diceless Roleplaying which certainly looked like that, but it is very much free form and expected, your 4e games look absolutely nothing like any 4e play that I've experienced.
If you look at what is probably the most epic adventure published, E3 Prince of Undeath, you will see that even at an extremely high level like this, the battles are actually very mundane, it's Orcus as a level 34 solo brute, 10 level 30 minions, and complex but fairly standard powers with high bonuses and DCs. It's well done because it's combined with a skill challenge, but apart from that, it is very technical, and when we played it, there was no silliness like grappling Orcus to force him to use his teleport 6 and bypassing his 1525 hit points.
I'm not saying that one style of play is better than another. I did not really enjoy that campaign ending with Prince of Undeath, because we were playing by the rules and seeing high level monsters and characters just hop on and off instead of flying, and never using 3D properly bugged me in each high level fight. Still, I was playing a shielding swordmage, and she was an awesome character.
But quite a few people enjoyed 4e as designed and written because there was a challenge to it, a technical one, but we all found narrativism very hard to come by because of the way all the powers were written as technical and did not make much sense narratively. For example, Orcus is really well designed as a Master of Death, the powers are straightforward death oriented, etc. but in the end, making him a brute and having him fight that way is bizarre, as is the ending explaining that if the fight goes against him, he will fly away out of the throne room and breaking all the rules established so far in the fight by really flying out of the encounter. Why ? Why can he do this at the end and not technically during the fight where it would give him a tremendous advantage ?
So you either play by the rules and have a very technical fight but one that does not make much sense narratively especially at the end, or you play wildly as you do, but it does not make a lot of sense to keep some rules and ignore a lot of others, and in that case, a less complete and constraining set of rules might serve you better.
Because where I've seen play like yours was actually mostly with AD&D or BECMI, where we really played demigods with incredible powers and their own logic, only loosely based on the much thinner rules anyway.