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Um... Can you see how picking out of a fairly long post a brief acknowledgment of the elephant in the room that is historical slavery and responding with "Everybody was doing it!" might not be a good look for you?

I'm not going to retread that argument. I was actually going in a different direction than questions of effortlessness and player responsibility. You only responded the first sentence of my post; please at the very least consider the second.

Again: if you want, you can play the battlemaster with just as little effort, dumping your superiority dice on every hit. If anything, the "intangibles" argument works in favor of the brute: because you can put more effort into the battlemaster and get more mileage out of those dice, the...

Um... am I missing something, or does this Prospero have no way to cast control weather? I don't think there's any other reasonable way to interpret the eponymous Tempest. By my reading he doesn't undergo that much character development over the course of the play: by the end it becomes clear...

I think the never-quite-finished weapon master was what the brute wanted to be. It's got the same damage math as the brute (which I think may be too high), in a more classic and appealing you-are-good-at-weapons package.

Okay. I have a few questions. Are you confident that you have a fair reading of "the whole argument" within its twenty-months-dead conversational context? Do you actually disagree with it? Are you going anywhere else with this? And is it important enough for you to keep @ing me about so long...

It seems to have been, paradoxically, a combination of too many choices and too few, in a "worst-of-both-worlds" situation. The game presented the player with a plethora of power and feat choices, prompting complaints of analysis paralysis, but the balance of the system math was so tight that...

Humans get +1 to everything. Half-orcs by comparison are effectively +1 Str, even Con, -1 everything else. So why are we complaining about removing racial penalties? They just hid the minus signs under a layer of math.

Incidentally, what are people's thoughts on the balance of the brute and the weapon master? They were written to indirectly rebalance the champion, but by my back-of-envelope math they seem to have overcorrected somewhat: an extra die of damage on every attack very quickly gets away from the...

I have a lot of fun in my campaign with the fact that according to every analysis by sage and scholar bardic magic shouldn't work, and yet it does. Like Tolkien's Tom Bombadil, they're friendly, singing reminders that the world is bigger and more mysterious than we can wrap our minds around. Or...

I mean, that's kind of what they did, right? If you think of "arcane magic" as the wizard specifically and "divine magic" as the cleric specifically, there's not a lot of overlap in their spell lists, and they're doing similar things to what they've done since 1E (though some clerics have...

Thus not the sort of player we are talking about. But it is the DM's job to teach the game to inexperienced players. If a player is new to the game and keeps forgetting about a class ability, not reminding them about it is the best way to ensure that they will continue to forget about that...

So you are positing a hypothetical DM who will remind this player that a 19 is a critical hit, but will not remind them that that they can spend superiority dice when they hit.

You are positing a hypothetical inexperienced player who cannot remember to roll an extra damage die whenever they hit, which happens on ~60-70% of attacks, but could remember to roll an extra damage die whenever they hit on a 19, which happens on 5% of attacks.

if a player is inexperienced and not interested in game mechanics, and they play a battlemaster anyway, they can just roll a superiority die every time they hit with an attack until they're out. They won't be as effective as a battlemaster who thinks tactically about how to use their dice... but...

Is there a reason the two have to be mutually exclusive?

First off, 2E was the only edition where bards couldn't cast healing spells (and even then they could fake it sometimes), so I'm not sure what you're complaining about at this late date. But to dig deeper, there is officially no such thing as "arcane magic" and "divine magic" in 5E. It doesn't...

This is completely alien to me. A battlemaster can go through three or four superiority dice in a single round if they really want to, and because it's a short-rest resource, there's less worry about conserving them. I rarely see my battlemaster player make it to a short rest with unspent dice...

Related: the grizzly bear is Ursus arctos horribilis -- meaning, as a friend of mine put it, "of all bears it is the one most horrible and most like a bear." Obviously it's not horrible at being a bear. It's very good at being a bear. That's precisely what makes it horrible to everybody else...

Although whether the real dire wolf was better or worse than the regular wolf at wolfing is a matter for some debate: after all, the dire wolf went extinct but the regular wolf is still here.