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Possibly because the system has, since 1e, been increasingly generous with spell casters. Since every spell is a power it means that characters with less powers feel worse relative to those with many.

This is pretty cool tbqh. Paradoxically it might actually end up increasing lethality, though. In any system where you get knocked unconscious at 0 HP it makes sense for monsters to ignore you, since you are no threat... But if characters can still act even at 0 HP then that changes things...

Sounds like it might be time to buff the monk then.

I think Chuubo's Marvelous Wish Granting Engine might also qualify depending on which genre you pick for the campaign and as long as the players stick to it. The system links experience gain to your quests, and quests are things that you pick yourself when you make a character. If you pick only...

It's doubly frustrating with stuff like crits. Hoorah you rolled a crit, but you also rolled the lowest result on your dice thereby dealing the like 2 damage instead of 24 damage and wohoo it turns out the monster you attacked as a damage reduction of 5 so you deal no damage. That certainly did...

Nobilis has a mildly weird setting and only slightly unusual mechanics, but the gameplay that emerges is typically absolutely insane. Player characters are so powerful (in a way that would shame D&D level 20 wizards) that it becomes impossible to predict the direction of anything. As a game...

You can typically find these comments I'm referring to pop up in every balance discussion. Nobody has been talking about 4E they've just been saying, like, 5E is kinda imbalanced (feel free to disagree with this statement) can we do something about that, and then out of nowhere this guy comes in...

It is highly GM dependent, and I say that from experience. For example whether or not the echo can "fly" is not something all GMs will agree on.

My argument holds even discarding the use of the words problem and solution. Even doing something like saying that perhaps D&D 5E should have more balanced classes opens up the common counterattack: "4E was balanced and it was bad, so we don't want balance here"

In my opinion whatever people think of 4E isn't interesting. Feel free to hate it or love it as much as you like. My chief concern is how 4E is always used as an argument in certain discussions as a reason for why we cannot use method X or Y to solve a particular problem, because X or Y is...

AI is bad for everything and should ideally be banned, except banning it is of course pretty much impossible so it's just a big waste of time. Some people argue that it democratises art but what it does is centralise it under those who own and produce media. Why hire a cover artist when you can...

Wouldn't every version of D&D have that problem, though? In 5E the issue would be that there are basically no rules for non-combat, so there is no "system" for a player to bypass using spells in the first place, but even if such a system could be created it could just as easily be bypassed by...

I feel like the attributes are ultimately pointless. A fighter, for example, should be "reasonably" strong in the worst case. We define a base level of capacity to which all fighters adhere at their worst and we then give the fighter things, perhaps something like class feats, which can improve...

One approach is to relax the requirement that every movement needs to be motivated by a rational decision. Combat is chaotic, so people doing stupid things makes sense. Heck you could ignore even the user of any taunt like maneuver entirely and treat it is an assertion from the player: "These...

Yes I think there's a lot of conservatism around things like setting changes more so than rule changes. The Swedish rpg Drakar & Demoner went through a similar thing in the 90s when they released Drakar & Demoner Chronopia, which was the fourth (or was it fifth?) edition of the system. Instead...

How is that a strawman? I don't care whether or not grappling is nerfed or whatever. Grappling is boring. I don't give a crap about it. My point is that the argument I quoted was bad: Although now that I read it again, I see it can have two different interpretations and I am no longer sure...

Not sure if my 4E experience was unusual or not. I hated it without having played it, because everything was off about it. The setting was wrong, they screwed over alignments (LE is THE evil alignment why was it removed? And why did they remove CG?), they changed the planes, skill challenges...

Dragonbane uses a deck of initiative cards. Since there's no way to get a bonus to initiative in that system anyway it works pretty well. Every player and monster draws a card and the number of the card is their initiative for the turn. When they are done with their turn they flip their card...

You would perhaps have a point regarding grappling if it was the case that grappling builds completely dominated and steered the game in an unhealthy direction. But they aren't. I have never seen anyone in 5E actually grapple anything. And the reverse would also hold in a hypothetical world...

I'm going slightly off topic here but you just opened my eyes to something... Hit points clearly don't represent "meat". They represent, like you say, things like exhaustion, morale and luck (and they also obviously represent physical resilience). This means that you could technically have a...