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Because dragons are classic solo monsters and should work if run as such.

I don't like this dragon. It is size of a bus but it does not hit hard at all. Breath weapon is pretty sad too. Its power comes from banishment, which completely overshadows the other options, and is annoying and boring. I want dragon that feels big and physically powerful. I want breath...

Yes, D&D combat uses randomness. So does that to you mean permanent death via combat is unacceptable? Because to me these would imply otherwise. If the PCs decide to ambush a dragon that has been harassing a city, if they decided to travel trough the Caves of Madness that is famous for its...

Like you suggest one way to do this sort of thing that the player is rewarded some way playing their flaws, be it with XP inspiration, fate points etc. It is still their choice whether to do it, but there is an incentive. Many games do this, and to me it is far superior to the method where the...

What sort of stupid out of the blue crap? Do you mean old school untelegraphed instakill traps and stuff like that? Because I'm not a fan of that sort of a thing either.

Again, these seem like default assumption of being a D&D adventurer for most people.

I think it is a game design issue in a sense that some things are far more liable to cause issues than some others. And to me it is blindingly obvious that "incite lust" roll (or something similar) that compels a character to act accordingly is solidly in the "more likely" end of things.

It is player's ability to influence the content and direction of the play. And it can manifest in many different ways, and some forms of agency may erode agency in other areas. To reuse my olde example yet again, to give the player agency to decide who the murderer is in a murder mystery would...

Then I do not understand your incredulity to my idea the players playing their characters would feel genuine emotions evoked by the fiction. I want mechanics to generate surprising situations. I empathetically do not wan them to generate the character's reactions to those situations. I have my...

So you have sort of meta OOC discussion about the matter and the players can suggest stakes? I believe it can be played that way, though I would hate it. I however do not believe this is this is an approach assumed by the rules. Granted, 5e rules are often unnecessarily vague about how they're...

Yes, I get that. And I think so does everybody. So that's why the rest doesn't make much sense to me. It seems to be a more elaborate version of "you just don't want social/personality mechanics to dictate what your character does because you want to play them as an unfeeling optimisation robot"...

Both I guess, though the specific discussion with Pemerton was related to the stake setting.

Could you elaborate on this? What D&D mechanics you are using to give players control of events outside the control of their characters?

Yes, this. And yeah, it means that like @pemerton says, this makes insight a free roll to gain more information. I just don’t see this as any sort of a problem. A lot of rolls in the game work like this. Knowledge rolls, many perception and investigation rolls. It is perfectly fine.

This is really tortured. Players negotiating about campaign premise is not even remotely the same thing as players having access to mechanics that allow them to direct the events of the game outside of the control of their characters. I don’t understand why you do this. Why can’t you admit...

Didn't you just a few posts ago imply this is impossible? Or is it that it you can only do it if the rules tell you what to feel? I'm so confused... o_O

That's all fine and good, but that definitely is the players affecting the stakes via means their characters are not aware of.

I find that simple mechanics such as D&D style skill checks are not particularly disruptive, if their outcomes can be smoothly folded into the fiction, but more complex ones where one needs to make several mechanical decisions that force us to pay more attention to the rules can be. (Like I...

Well, given bounded accuracy, I don't think constant success is guaranteed in 5e. But I certainly endeavour to describe results of insight in more nuanced manner, and it can provide a lot of information besides whether someone is lying.

Right. And if we decide that this is the goal and try to facilitate it then it is likely to happen more. But if we just say it is impossible and do not even bother then it probably is not going to happen much.