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It's a regular source of frustration for me when the lumping/splitting on this issue puts 3e and 4e together here. 4e, especially with skill challenges taken into consideration, is best understood either as a 3rd rail (player action declarations falling outside the rules should generally be...

We fluctuate between 70 and 72. I've never quite understood the time boundaries my parents always had around AC/heating, there was always a big to do around whether "it was time" to turn on the heater or AC for the season. I was honestly surprised to learn as an adult there's no procedure beyond...

That's just a more granular version of LR as it currently exists, right? LR is basically how a 3 hit point tracker, especially if we assume most spell conditions are roughly equivalent to death. It's more flexible, but I think the issue there is that doesn't solve the mixed party problem...

Probably change it out for a flat reduction to damage from spells, which you could increase with CR, and then some variation of "Action: end serious condition x/day" and/or "bonus action: end less serious condition x/day." It might also reasonable to make it a reaction or legendary action in...

Honestly, I think the biggest factor is that melee combat is cool, but it takes a ton of contrivance to make it aesthetically reasonable to do. A faux medieval setting is one of the easiest ways to make sure swords are relevant.

You've listed 5 things D&D has historically had tables and rules and laundry lists for. We can quibble about the exact abstraction, but it's clearly not impossible to actually write specific rules for those things. You seem to have defined the design task as the problem here, and then proceeded...

I really hate this attitude, precisely because I feel like it misses other primary strengths of RPGs; they're unbounded in play time, can provide way more points of interaction than a video game, and are very, get way to create new content for. There's plenty of reasons to want to play a TTRPG...

Right, I'm pretty firmly in the "just actually write rules for everything" camp, and I'd argue this is a pretty heavy yoke on that kind of design. You're talking on extra design work for a return that at best exists entirely in your own head, and at worst, actively makes a player have a worse...

This is usually an adult conversation moment for me, and it really depends on the the background of the game in the first place. Am I pitching these players on some theme/setting concept I like? Then I'm probably going to want to be persuaded that this character will support that structure in...

Why would you include options that can't hold up to a cost/benefit analysis as player facing material? If you consistently make say "losing your actions" the risk of using a mechanic, players will not engage with it and you've wasted your time designing it. I'm all for a transparent, fixed...

I don't think power is a huge concern. The class is essentially in the warlock chassis for spellcasting. They don't have eldritch blast as a consistent damage option, and have a MAD problem if they want to fight with weaponry and get less invocation equivalent ability that's traded off for...

I desperately want to play one, but I'm DMing for the foreseeable forever. It's probably the most complicated class to build, and has a lot of options moment to moment, feels sort of like Warlock+ in build structure.

That's conceptually promising, but that's just not how adventuring days work. They're largely inside the player's control, unless you use pretty specific narrative pressures or an outside rules structure. Players can influence the number of encounters they have between rests, and they have...

The most frustrating part of TTRPG discussion will always be the insistence that the rules producing unwanted results cannot possibly be a systemic problem with the rules.

That's the tension between two gameplay modes in action. If there's a negotiation based mode available, and it's shown to routinely produce better outcomes or is just more understandable to the player, then it becomes easier and more normalized to use it as the default means of...

It's often a very short negotiation, and as you note, generally presupposes everyone has a very similar goal to begin with. I think of Rule of Cool as the inverse face of the old Mother-May-I crack, focused more on highlighting the player's contributions than on the GM's unspoken internal...

I don't care for the framing as player entitlement, but I do agree with the premise for a specific framing of "gaming." Rule of Cool is usually a player forward means of shifting the structure of the game into negotiation. Players set out what they'd like to happen, GMs set costs or risks, and...

On the one hand, I really don't think everything needed to be a spell, but on the other this was the only real action economy exploit in all of 5e, which is where the power really comes from, and I support either closing that hole or making free level appropriate actions more available to...

Levitation, with the assumption that the potion requires enough build up to take effect, and that's unpredictable. People spontaneously start floating, without precise control over their altitude. Over time, they acclimate, gain control, and a whole system of rooftop gardens and storage/industry...

I don't know how to be clearer about this, but bolded line is exactly the kind of thing that points out this change in design. Skills aren't related to challenges and don't scale in the paradigm I'm taking about. An iteration in the design direction I'm suggesting is more likely to remove say...