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If you want to be ever so slightly charitable, the failure caused the guard to harass our singer. I highly doubt that anyone narrates all NPCs in a city scene at all times, so the failure means that a guard who could plausibly be passing, un-noticed (and un-narrated and not introduced directly...

The argument, I think, would be that experimentation with resource systems might lead the designers to find one that they really liked and them deciding to apply that universally to see how that worked.

Grand, does that have any impact on the concept that we can analyse whether or not the changes did or did not have precedent based on reading the rules text? You can certainly disagree about whether you like the changes made, but whether or not they had precedent should be pretty objective...

I don't think that's relevant - the text is the text and we can see if the things being held up as new feature are actually new or not. Unless you think it's just impossible to objectively review the rules text of games?

For 3e? The stat blocks in the relevant monster manuals. Mobs are described here : Template - Mobs - sorry, don't have the original text handy but I know they popped up in later Monster Manuals If I am a GM and I am creating an encounter with a large number of (say) bats in it, I can chose to...

It's something that we can determine fairly straighforwardly by looking at the text. There's very little mechanically in there that doesn't have precedent elsewhere. At Will spells have precedent in 3e Reserve feats. Non-AC Defenses are described almost exactly in Unearthed Arcana (under...

In precisely the same way as you might treat a creature as a different weight class in 4e. Whenever the GM decided it was more sensible for you to do so, largely for administrative reasons or to make a creature more challenging over a larger level range.

Right, but the fact is, they existed. The concept that a creature could have different stats depending on who it was fighting and who it was accompanying was established pre-4e - that you didn't like them, or didn't use them, or rationalised them away doesn't stop them existing. As I said...

This isn't true - it wasn't common but swarms and mobs also had this property. And for the same reason - to keep a certain monster relevant at higher levels while putting a cap on mechanical complexity. It's an example where 4e made a difference in degree, but not of kind.

Absolutely, You can make a fairly passable 4e clone with 3e unearthed arcana, Bo9S, ToM and so on.

Often enough, it's a minor sub-genre on Youtube

Well, because people keep posting about it.

I don't think this is really true. Let's say we have a scenario where there are two paths through a wood. One passes by a cave where an Ogre lairs and the other passes by a stream where the Ogre fishes sometimes. The party is informed by a reliable local that the Ogre is normally found...

While I would generally agree with your position, I think this is a trope that might be attractive to some players - you defeat the bad guy in some darkened hole then crawl out, fatally wounded, to catch one last glimpse of the sun or a last word with your friends who were just a moment too late...

So I can better understand why I don't like it so I can avoid doing similar things in my own games? It might be there's some itch in my own play that I'm not quite sure how to articulate but is laid bare by a larger example. For example I might find something a bit off wandering monsters and...

For a long while, the monster with the most kills in classic WoW was the Defias Pillager, a fairly common NPC enemy found in one of the early zones

Before the first expansion, the human city in WoW - Stormwind - reachable at level 1, contained a black dragon and their minions that could potentially appear and kill any low level character in the castle at the time. Higher level elites than most mobs prowled the Silverpine woods in the Sons...

On the subject of Encounters and Bypassing them - instinctively as a GM I think of "bypassing" to mean avoiding a fight - there's an assumption that I don't think is uncommon that we are generally referring to combat by Encounters. It might be worth considering an example. Let's presume we've...

Yes - essentially within the described zone I had plotted out cover and so on, outside of it I was improvising. It felt to me as the GM that the primary determinator of success wasn't the characters or their capabilities, it was how willing I was to let them succeed and let them "bypass" the...

In this case the PCs didn't end up having a combat on the battlemap as I'd prepared - they instead made use of stealth and illusions to reach the target lair without having a fight. This is kind of why I raised this example - the resulting gameplay to me felt like it relied a lot more on my...