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It wasn't backstory. It happened during the game. The lost love was the player's wife's PC who was killed in that Fireball. All of this was emergent gameplay. And all of it was made better by the mechanic allowing permanant loss of things acquired along the way. You might not like the idea of...

All of this is entirely wrong. They are all characters at my table over the years: Sterling Trueblade, Jax the Tragic, Fimble Twaddlebottom. That paladin never had a more powerful sword. The rogue made a "sacrifice" in his retelling of what happened for years. The ring and sword were lost due to...

Morality in D&D will depend heavily on the nature of the world in which the game is set. Are good/evil absolute? Are they elemental forces? Does everyone know for sure that there are gods and an afterlife? A great deal of real-world philosophy and religion stem from the lack of certainty...

Strongly disagree. This is the stuff of great war stories. The grizzled Paladin who carries around the pommel of his once-mighty Holy Avenger as a reminder that one should not take blessings for granted. The bard who wears the melted magic ring of his lost elven love so that his tragedy will...

You could certainly make an interesting D&D campaign from the core concept of "The Good Place". The PCs have died and gone to their afterlife. However, not all is as it seems...

There hasn't really been a good definition of Combat as War thus far. The reason being that it begs the quesiton, "Which war? What kind of war? With what goals?" There's no such thing as generic "war" as a end-all-be-all description of how forces conduct themselves in and out of combat.

Combat as war is the only approach both for my NPCs/monsters and the PCs. There are a lot of PC deaths in the game. But this is a feature, not a bug. This particular campaign is OSR; where the world, not the PCs, is the main focus of the game. The PCs serve as a way to explore that world and...

Isn't strength exclusively used for leaping?

Sounds like you might not be compatable with the group at your table. :(

I usually go "by the book" for treasure. If a dragon has a Treasure Type of "H", then I roll the dice and see what results. There is a dragon not too far from the player's base (PC levels 1-3) that has over 50,000 coins in his horde. This isn't really a big problem if you track encumbrance. A...

I run an open world West Marches game. Just last night, the 1st-3rd level party encountered a dragon. They fled into cover and hid. Then they traced the dragon back to its lair and started a stake-out. When the dragon flew off to go find food they raced into its lair, filled their pockets with...

No. I'm saying magic can create sanity breaking unreality - among other things that would otherwise be impossible. Darkness is one such thing. An area of darkness that would otherwise be lit by ambient conditions.

Darkness doesn't block light. I can see a light far away, even though there is darkness between myself and the light. Makes perfect sense to me. There are no logical impossibilities here. I can imagine all of this quite consistently. However, also..yes. Magic is capable of creating "logical...

I wasn't judging whether a player veto was right or wrong. Only that they always have it as an option, and therefore have no loss of agency. My base assumption, and my personal experience, is that a game table has reasonable humans who are all there to help each other have a fun time. I feel...

Obscured by darkness, obviously. And yes, you absolutely can handwave impossibility with 'magic'. That's what magic is for.

I was talking about player agency. Not PC agency. The player can always veto something that happens to their PC. They have full agency. There may, of course, be consequences to these choices. But the choice is there nonetheless.

Not impossible at all. You just described it. "You can clearly see things on the other side of the patch of darkness. But within, all seems dark and obscured." How is this possible? Magic.

If you are standing in conceiling terrain, you are able to hide from anyone in any direction - as you are in the terrain. And if you are behind Blocking Terrain then you have already established a specific vantage. Otherwise the word 'behind' has no meaning.

If I recall correctly, in earlier editions there were spells to let you know how damaged other characters were.

How can they tell how physically "un-fine" they are? Humans in the real world often have no idea how seriously wounded or close to death they are. Do characters in your games have a much more accuracte sense of their own wounds?