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This isn't true - it wasn't common but swarms and mobs also had this property. And for the same reason - to keep a certain monster relevant at higher levels while putting a cap on mechanical complexity. It's an example where 4e made a difference in degree, but not of kind.

Absolutely, You can make a fairly passable 4e clone with 3e unearthed arcana, Bo9S, ToM and so on.

Often enough, it's a minor sub-genre on Youtube

Well, because people keep posting about it.

I don't think this is really true. Let's say we have a scenario where there are two paths through a wood. One passes by a cave where an Ogre lairs and the other passes by a stream where the Ogre fishes sometimes. The party is informed by a reliable local that the Ogre is normally found...

While I would generally agree with your position, I think this is a trope that might be attractive to some players - you defeat the bad guy in some darkened hole then crawl out, fatally wounded, to catch one last glimpse of the sun or a last word with your friends who were just a moment too late...

So I can better understand why I don't like it so I can avoid doing similar things in my own games? It might be there's some itch in my own play that I'm not quite sure how to articulate but is laid bare by a larger example. For example I might find something a bit off wandering monsters and...

For a long while, the monster with the most kills in classic WoW was the Defias Pillager, a fairly common NPC enemy found in one of the early zones

Before the first expansion, the human city in WoW - Stormwind - reachable at level 1, contained a black dragon and their minions that could potentially appear and kill any low level character in the castle at the time. Higher level elites than most mobs prowled the Silverpine woods in the Sons...

On the subject of Encounters and Bypassing them - instinctively as a GM I think of "bypassing" to mean avoiding a fight - there's an assumption that I don't think is uncommon that we are generally referring to combat by Encounters. It might be worth considering an example. Let's presume we've...

Yes - essentially within the described zone I had plotted out cover and so on, outside of it I was improvising. It felt to me as the GM that the primary determinator of success wasn't the characters or their capabilities, it was how willing I was to let them succeed and let them "bypass" the...

In this case the PCs didn't end up having a combat on the battlemap as I'd prepared - they instead made use of stealth and illusions to reach the target lair without having a fight. This is kind of why I raised this example - the resulting gameplay to me felt like it relied a lot more on my...

To give a simple example of the potential conflict between prep and agency I'd like to offer an encounter from a recent 5e game. The PCs were hunting for an item that they believed was in the lair of a giant dinosaur type beast. They had been beaten to it by a rival NPC group who had slain the...

I think that's probably the more likely cause, but you could also see how this could very plausibly flow from principles based on the assumption that the world keeps progressing. For example, we could posit this wasn't the henchmen being idiots, it was deliberate sabotage due to one of them...

I mean, the example I gave here (WHFRP) is one of the first roleplaying games ever produced - it'll be 40 years old next year and the mechanic here (fate points) is from it's first edition. It's got it's own share of issues, but the specific one mentioned isn't one of them. And given how...

I'd largely agree with this - consider if you'd been running this in, say, WFRP, @Enrahim. In this case the rules of the game provide for the players to explicitly call out (through the Fate Point mechanic) that they don't want their characters to be killed by random crits. So rather than an...

The trigger is "When you hit a creature", so yes, by default

5e Battlemaster - Menacing Attack. To a lesser extent Goading Attack

I'm not sure that follows, all it needs is for the railroading to be being done by an entity in the game world. A high level caster placing a compulsion on a character party (Geas is the typical example) is a fairly classic railroading technique and one that may align entirely with established...

If I'm designing a new game or indeed just a mod map for Oblivion, I'll want to consider the first case - control systems are important in ensuring the game in enjoyable. The limitations of staring at a screen compared to actually existing in a world will also inform how I need to present the...