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I strongly disagree. RPGs are not like Snakes and Ladders or Poker. There's a sense of continuity to RPGs that these other games lack. There's no real character or story to lose at. There is winning and losing, but it's fundamentally mechanical. It's not like poker player 1 is role playing his...

Death can be an unsatisfying conclusion to a character's story, but it is a conclusion nonetheless (or it might simply be a speed bump, if resurrection is on the table). All of those hours spent playing that character are still there. Whereas the mechanics that I referred to as punitive are...

You can up the challenge however much you want. If four orcs can't challenge them, try six orcs. If six orcs still don't cut it, try eight orcs. Eventually, finding the sweet spot is virtually inevitable. Frankly, I calibrate the difficulty of the game for each different party I run for...

I disagree. Increasing lethality in the game is effortless. Throw a dozen Tarrasques at a first level party. Game over, irrespective of edition. What's difficult, and what earlier editions did very poorly, was helping DMs who didn't necessarily want to constantly wreck their party. High...

To me this is like instituting roll 3d6 in order as the default method, just so that I can be the "good guy" when I say that's silly and go with 4d6, arrange as desired. I certainly don't want that or consider it beneficial. I don't think WOTC should be designing the game around the idea of...

I think we need to draw a distinction between a system that allows such costs to exist, vs a system that doesn't include such costs in the default. I would say that 5e is a case of the latter, not the former. You can absolutely make a monster that level drains, or ages characters, or destroys...

Yeah, I think that, particularly with the heroic vs pragmatic axis, it's often a social contract. Ideally it's how everyone wants to play. But sometimes it isn't, which is why you sometimes hear DMs who want to run pragmatic oriented games give the advice, "Just keep killing the characters...

It was D&D 3.5. The DM was experienced but it was his first time running 3rd and he didn't have a good feel for it. He wasn't explicitly trying to kill us, just challenge us, but he had a habit of overestimating what we could actually handle. But, there was basically an unspoken gentlemen's...

There are heroic games with high deadliness and heroic game with low (even no) deadliness. There can certainly some correlation between deadliness and resource scarcity, but it's not the end all be all. A DM who creates difficult encounters but pulls their punches to avoid killing characters...

You're cross cutting heavily. A lot of your factors have a loose correlation at best. Take that extremely deadly "heroic" style campaign I mentioned earlier. That was: "If the characters are frequently fighting for survival, Bad Things happening to party members is an accepted fact of life...

Yeah, when my aunt asks me about my gaming, we always refer to any game I'm playing as "Dungeons and Dumplings", a long running joke from when I was 8 (for context, I'm now 41).

The choice of polar opposites was intentional, as that allows for a scale, as opposed to strategic and tactical which are more of a Venn diagram. Strategy and tactics can exist at any table to various degrees. Whereas symmetric and asymmetric are trying to convey two distinct approaches. They...

Right, but I feel like on a D&D message board we can hold ourselves to a slightly more precise standard than that.

You could use the terms symmetrical and asymmetric.

Yeah, if we assume that D&D is to be a term meaning ~70% of the RPGs out there, then it's more or less become functionally synonymous with RPG. I'm not sure why anyone would consider that a useful evolution of the term, as opposed to referring to TSR/WOTC D&D (which is already quite broad, but...

If they mean the "D&D family" then they should say that. Advanced Labyrinth Lord shares a lot of DNA with Rules Cyclopedia D&D. If we're discussing RC D&D and you start talking about ability scores of 19, then I'm going to ask what you're talking about. Because ALL has them but RC didn't. If...

IIRC they also did a Mom class for one of the April issues.

Things have names for a reason. If you say D&D, but your intended meaning is Torg or SWN, any misunderstandings arising thereof are on you. When my aunt, who knows relatively nothing about RPGs, refers to every RPG as D&D, I follow her meaning because I know that she understands nothing about...

Because it's like calling every guy Steve just because they share some basic physical similarities. John is Steve, Tim is Steve, Joe is Steve, etc. It would be confusing and nonsensical. D&D is the stuff that says D&D on the cover. Other works may be D&D derived (True 20, Level Up) or D&D...

That simply isn't true. I played in a campaign that focused on heroic combat but was extremely deadly (averaging one or two deaths every game session). I've played in a few other campaigns that involved heroic combat but were quite deadly nonetheless (not quite as deadly as the aforementioned...