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No more than I am, not killing PCs in my 5e games right out of the gate. The DM in 5e can kill the PCs whenever he wants, just as the DM in 1e could. The DM in those 1e games wasn't choosing to, and neither am I.

Or the 1e games I played in, in 1986 and thereabouts, and the one I was playing in when 3e came out, just weren't stereotypical meatgrinders.

Maybe you were joking, maybe I wasn't, maybe tone and nuance go to the Internet to die.

I find I get more enjoyment from watching the players/characters figure out how to avoid dying, but you do you.

Seems as though if people really are having trouble staying engaged during long, slow turns, the obvious options are to speed things up somehow--which probably involves playing a different game, or maybe running a smaller table--or figuring out a way to keep combat engaging for the people who...

I was playing 1e in the mid-late 1980s, and I didn't stop playing it until well after 3e came out. There were breaks, when I didn't have groups, but I played in more 1e campaigns than I've run 5e (which seems more relevant).

This was the entirety of what I was responding to ... ... and I thought I gave that about as much respect as it deserved. Your later posts have in fact indicated that you're not such a hardcase as you first pretended. I'm clearly a bit more ... relaxed and maybe understanding about people...

I don't believe "total immersion" exists, so I'm obviously not looking for it. What I believe in--what I've seen--is something like a flow state, which can involve processes just fine: I've lost time to co-op board games at least as much as to TRPGs, and the board games aren't even making a...

Sure, and I respect the players at the online tables I'm running enough that if there's a slow response, there's some issue other than inattention.

I'm sorry, I'm not that kind of naughty word.

5e has (or at least had) a perfectly functional surprise rule, and I've had both PCs and monsters dropped "without knowing what hit them."

I've seen more 5e PCs die than 1e ones, so I guess demonstrably 5e is more PC-lethal than 1e was?

Yeah, one of the big differences between us is that for me the setting is important mainly as a place where things happen, and they happen in the game to and around the PCs; the characters and the events matter more to me than the setting does. I'm not trying to model anything, at least not the...

You obviously get to decide what's enough for you, but I think if I were trying to make this determination this way, I'd probably want to really look at how potent the monsters I was using were supposed to be in the different editions. (I think the point is plausibly provable this way, I just...

Inside every question is a simple and obvious answer just waiting to come out. 😉 I'm not snarking on you, honest (I think you've seen me snark, and I think you can tell the difference); I'm just gesturing at the fact that "obvious and easy to understand" is often a trap.

That's probably not as fair as it seems on the surface. The same monsters are often specifically different power levels in different editions. Running a bunch of, say, 3rd-level PCs against a number of wights will be very different between 1e and 5e, in part because wights are not intended to be...

That's a reasonable question, but in the same way that you can run 1e without much in the way of PC deaths (I was in three year-long 1e AD&D campaigns in the mid-1980s in which no PCs died, and these were not Hickman Revulsion adventures) you can run 5e to be extraordinarily lethal. The defaults...

It's usually pretty easy to tell if someone isn't paying attention if you're playing in-person. It's often much harder to tell if you're online, especially if you for whatever reason/s aren't using cameras. Is that player not responding because they aren't paying attention, or did their...

My impression is that "dungeon level" was more an overall "level appropriate" indicator than anything else, based on when PCs should/would probably be getting to a given dungeon level. That obviously becomes less useful as the game moves away from dungeons (and the 1e games I was in, in the...

Usually my dice have the monsters I'm running performing interpretative dances on their turns, when they should plausibly be attacking the PCs. Once in a while, though, they just decide THE STARS ARE RIGHT AND ALL THE PCS MUST DIE NOW.