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And the roles generally followed a pattern based on their power source. Martial characters were good to great at dealing damage, regardless of their primary role. Divine characters were supportive and party friendly, thus leaning Leader. Arcane characters had lots of control, AoE, and movement...

Arrays default, point buy a default option, dice an alternative with the note "your results may produce chargers that are particularly weak or particularly strong, use at your own risk" or the like. All arrays should something you could achieve via point buy, or ever so slightly better but only...

Dragonborn. Assuming it wasn't a pure joke, then this would I guess come out of a "well if one half of the title can be a player character, why not the other half huh?" Which is silly enough that I feel pretty confident it was a joke. Hence why I said if we take it seriously.

Believe me, I've seen this behavior pattern in plenty of other places, it ain't unique to D&D. "IF THIS IS GONE I QUIT!!!" 4000 upvotes. Playercount when the official system changes: no negative change.

We should not design something based on the predicate, "Oh, nobody ever actually plays this, so it doesn't matter if it's badly-made!" Yeeees... Such as, I dunno, oscillating power variation...or converging power variation... Because, as stated, it is bad design to take as an assumption...

We have a spell list inherited from a time when there were only two or maaaaybe three ways to be Someone Who Flings Supernatural Stuff....that is now being forced to be the spell list for a world where there are half-a-dozen such ways, all of them mutually self-reinforcing and entrenching.

Yep. People act like genericization is a cost-free change. It isn't. It's actually a very costly change. That doesn't mean we have to make a hyperspecific class for every concept....but it does mean that it is NOT guaranteed that "less is more". It, in fact, means that less is--to the shock of...

They very nearly are, it requires almost no investment to reach that. Actually investing in it makes them utterly terrifying: it's straight-up "eat actual Striker-like damage if you ignore the mark, or flail uselessly against a massive wall if you heed it." Yes....so....you see how your own...

Oh, no, not popular at all. Only had enough influence to affect one of the most widely played video games of all time. Pull the other one, Zard. I'm quite well aware that 3e is what made Druid ridiculously, stupidly powerful.

But that's not what it is. Using completely made-up numbers: One thing starts at 10 and grows to 30. The other starts at 1, and grows so that between (say) 4 and 8, the two are pretty close together (intersecting at 6, where both are 16), only to then shoot off to 3000 by level 20. Yes, during...

Nope! Because that, itself, was an evolution out of what had happened in late 2e. Your assertion of a sharp discontinuity doesn't hold.

You said nobody could learn certain kinds of skills. Hence, there could not be schools, because...people don't learn them. Are you now saying there are schools Fighters can attend to become (say) sword-saints, where they can learn Aura Cutter or whatever once they've refined their skills enough...

See, I don't even think it's "dark ages" per se. I think the key difference is that D&D went from something kinda-sorta-ish like realpolitik and logistics, to something kinda-sorta-ish like romanticism and adventure. Folks who like realpolitik see romanticism as gaudy, garish, childish, a...

What I'd say is, it was part of the completely BS pop-history hodgepodge that people mistakenly think is "Medieval". It has ladies in 12th century fashion living in 9th century castles swooning over 16th century plate-armored knights while lords practicing 17th century political philosophy...

My problem with the question is a single word. "Default". The default game is not steampunk, for a variety of reasons. It's not even Victoriana, which would be (in a sense) "steampunk" with less steam and no punk. But I do think that D&D is, shall we say, sprawling out from where it started...

13th Age. Really truly excellent game design--that is definitely not a narrative game. Unless you consider 4e to be a narrative game, which I'm fairly sure you would not. Great example thereof: They actually solved the 3.5e Druid Problem. That is, the problem that the 3rd edition Druid is both...

Mighty Deeds. Not something they get access to instantly, something they grow into. A Mighty Deed at (say) 5th level might be holding up the portcullis so all your friends can get out safely, then slipping under yourself. Something no living human on Earth could do, but which is only the...

And almost none of them will ever have any interest in starting. Which is the bigger thing, since (remember) Lanefan's arguments often boil down to "well if we force them to play X way, they'll just go along with it and then we'll change how people choose to play." Which is, perhaps...

Well, if I were taking the concept seriously, I imagine it would draw upon and/or represent all the weird, amorphous, deceptive denizens of the dungeon, but in a way that grants them sapience, agency, and the ability to join society-at-large. Just as dragonborn draw upon and/or represent the...

But that isn't actually balance. Like even in a long-term sense, it's not actually balance. It's literally not long-term balance, because in the long term, things become more unbalanced than they were before. Instead, it is, at absolute best, temporary middle-term balance: a range of levels...