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4E had this with the range of weapons as well.

I've never been a fan of mecha so for me, "cool concept" has always been elusive. Weirdly, I don't mind things like that in fantasy and I do love me some clockpunk.

While I totally agree that logistics is a crucial driver of military choices, the horse lasted in transport and logistics through World War II. Really only the US and British armies were fully mechanized. Many German divisions were horse-drawn through the entire war. The last cavalry charge of...

I believe it's opposed to the French War, which lasted from the end of World War II to 1954.

Certainly, and the goal is not to simulate real combat at all, generally, but heroic genre fiction. I'm not sure I agree with either point. Mid 19th Century rifled muskets were indeed quite deadly but the rifle bullets designed in the late 19th Century smokeless powder era were roughly...

If you can get players to agree to that, more power to you (literally and figuratively). I think in nearly any group I've played with over the years this would not fly and would be considered a serious violation of player autonomy.

Falling is one of D&D's "Murphy's rules". True. That's true, but hit points aren't entirely "plot armor" either. For instance, natural healing back in the older versions of the game was very, very slow, so it would revert to quasi-realism. There are many other ways hit points don't line up...

A big part of it is that daggers are plenty deadly... against ordinary people. A commoner has 4 hp and is rendered down and dying by a successful dagger strike by another commoner 25% of the time; two strikes are typically down and dying, with but a stab or two to dead. That's not really off...

True enough, and those are big reasons guns took over from melee and archery. In some cases there's quite a bit of measurable information. A Medieval crossbow compared to even pretty weak guns lose out on the ground of energy delivered to the target. Of course, an arrow is sharp and if the shaft...

Melee combat has made a comeback, too, at different times. World War I had a lot of it due to the nature of trench warfare, and whenever static line warfare with a lot of skirmishing and patrolling has reappeared (Italian Front, Stalingrad, lots in China, etc.) or during the Korean War, the...

I agree, the real issue shows up when people start meta-gaming Hit Points. Falling I think is one of the worst examples in D&D, though, because of how much experience people have IRL with it (alas, I have a lot of experience with falling, and the injuries to prove it). I agree with you that in...

STA and the other Modiphius 2D20 games are 100% aimed at genre emulation more than any kind of simulation of "reality." For instance, Stress and Wounds, which are common to all 2D20 games, are quite clearly set up to feel like a fairly pulpy action show and in STA you have to take Threat to make...

That's not just new to 5E, I'm pretty sure that Gygax made roughly the same justification back in the day. The problem is that things like falling damage end up feeling rather ridiculous for high level characters. So a lot of it comes down to what you want hit points to represent, which...

I'm not sure I'd say "unworthy of respect" but they are certainly expecting too much. I endeavor to treat everyone with respect as much as possible, especially when I disagree with them, although that obviously gets very hard. Yeah to me that sounds like more of a playstyle or culture...

It may, but it may be griefer type behavior as well, where a person gets their jollies from being disruptive. I guess one could say bullying and the like comes from a very real frustration but this can extend all the way up to personality or character issues but IMO that's a set of...

RPGs aren't necessarily narrative. They had a narrative streak to them but the wargame origins of D&D are pretty evident. Many modern games are much more explicitly narrative than D&D has really ever been and have game mechanical structures that support that. 5E has a few toes dipped in the...

That's true but RL complicates things, as it always does, and doesn't make for a clear and dispassionate decision about what one wants from a game an easy thing. Until fairly recently often the group you had was it, so you had to invest in it more and may well have put up with things you might...

Yes, this is the "Coke" (before there was a need to use the term Classic) version. And this was the "New Coke" version, although the "Classic" version who was always angling for a beneficial interpretation never truly went away. However, I do think that the New Coke version could be very...

Exactly. The hagiography makes them look inhuman. The dirty reality is that they were all too human with frailties such as exactly that. The amazing thing is that they realized this, for the most part. Washington deciding that being king would be a really bad thing was a profoundly good insight.

If I recall correctly, one of the reasons that set Washington on the path of rebellion was the fact that the British refused to let him obtain a regular commission.