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Yup, exactly this. RPGs are Make Believe with rules there to provide structure, controlled randomness, and predictability. The only point of having rules is to support the make believe. When the make believe has to run after the rules there's a problem. Yeah, I've given up trying to convince...

Yes, they could have done something useful and turned hit dice back into proper healing surges and brought back the best piece of 4e design, limited healing resources, made PCs less reliant on magical healing, and made it easier to attrit down PCs without spending multiple sessions. But nope...

Right, which means that you should provide a flavor description that has as little vagueness as possible so that the DM can adjudicate things well and mechanics with a bit of wiggle room so that they can apply to everything that that flavor would apply to since you can't write mechanics for...

Upthread someone quoted a WotC statement that they started puttering about with 5.5e pretty much as soon as 5e hit the presses. I expect that they'll be starting the spitballing stage of 6e sometime next year and whether that stays on the backburner to get turned into something publishable a...

Agreed completely. I think speeding up people's turns is worth a bit of loss of tactical depth. After all if you can get more turns done in an hour you can often get more interesting tactical decisions made per HOUR even if you're doing less tactically per TURN. The 1e DMG had exactly that...

Like I said upthread you're confusing hill to die on with litmus test. For example, if my DM tells me "sneak attack is really OP" then I'm noping out of that game since any DM that thinks that doesn't know 5e mechanics well enough to run a good 5e game. This is the case even if I'm playing a...

Maybe we have different inspirations. For me one of my biggest D&D inspirations is fairy tales and players skating through loopholes in spells because they didn't have iron clad clauses is the most fairy tale thing I can possibly imagine. I'd stand up and give that player a high five for being...

I think my way of playing D&D is the best way (I'm biased like that) but I sure as hell don't think it would avoid most problems as I know most people don't want to play things my way. 5e as a compromise option between my way of playing D&D and other styles worked decently enough despite being...

For me at least 5e plays like a cleaned up version of 3.5e. Which is good enough for a lot of things... Yeah and a lot of people are getting grumpy at 5.5e for not adding enough crunch. I think it's pretty safe to say that if 5.5e added as much crunch as some people wanted it would be harder to...

Yup, I just love it when there gets to be a bit of chaos. Straight-up brawls get a bit samey after a while, the last game I DMed was a Star Wars game that had all kinds of crazy naughty word like PCs jumping out of the back of transport ships to try to board Tie Fighters and stab the pilots with light...

"You can just houserule it" is never a good response to (subjective or objective) problems with the rules. That's like telling people who are upset about linear fighters, quadratic wizards to "just houserule it if you prefer balance." Yes. This is my favorite part of D&D when I'm DMing. I'm so...

Yes, I think 2030 is a good general guess for 6e. I've been playing a Blades in the Dark campaign and for the first time I'm having a game in which encumbrance is actually interesting. I've always liked the IDEA of encumbrance rules but have generally found them to be a real pain in the ass in...

Yeah, at the most basic level if you're playing on a grid with minis its annoying to have to jam two minis onto the same square if one is grappling the other. This is one case where playability should come before realism. Fine to imagine things like Hulk grabbing a dude and holding him in one...

5e grappled also allowed you to drag them around, but yeah, Grabbed would've been a clearer way of expressing the condition than Grappled. Often had newbies be surprised at how little the Grappled condition did.

The things that 4e fans liked the most about 4e and the things that people who didn't like 4e hated about 4e are often separate things. In 5.5 seems to have decided (to a limited extent) to put back in some of the things about 4e that really rubbed a lot of 4e haters the wrong way, while also...

Only 25 hours behind in the backlog of trying to reply to everything relevant to my OP :) Working on it, working on it... For me at least what helps bring RPG stories to life is flavor REALLY mattering. That's why the harder it is to reskin a mechanic the more I like it. Kids have always...

Yup, "ruling not rules" what was supposed to be a big part of 5e. Yeah, I don't think arbitrating this is as hard as some people are making it out to be. I think a fair reading of the spell description argues otherwise as "flee" is explicitly allowed even if it results in you getting hit by...

Yup, everything can be a pretty arbitrary "it's magic" but some kinds of magic are more fun for me in the game than others. For example you find no save death effects in a lot of fantasy fiction, but that's not much fun in an actual game. It's not always that clear-cut. There's the question...

It's moving in a general 4e direction but very slowly. Personally it doesn't have to be a very big change of direction for me to not want to play 5.5e since I'm not going to put in the effort of keeping track of a whole slew of changes if it was just treading water, let along moving (very...

Yeah, I think that from a business perspective a conservative edition is clearly the right move for 5e. If I were at the helm of WotC and trying to maximize profits and forced to make a new edition my version of 5.5e would be even more conservative than the one we're getting (which would be...