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For my own self, and I know many will find so much to criticize about this: 4e was a great structure presented badly. 5e actively tried to avoid anything that smelled like 4e, to the point of repeatedly reinventing the wheel, sometimes completely unnecessarily (e.g., 4e crits are just flat...

All I can say is, I never had this experience with 3e or 4e. 5e? I have had it, as stated, pretty consistently. Hussar's group is the only one I've been in that hasn't suffered this or some other problem that ended the campaign in relatively short order. There's a reason I am pretty critical...

How long has your group been playing together? In every one of these cases, this was the first time these players were playing together. As stated, some of them were (varyingly distant) friends I had already had for other reasons, but they were not "gaming friends", they were "people I met...

Yes, I'm aware it didn't. I see that as a pretty significant problem. I saw it as one then (my very very very first introduction to TTRPGs was the 2nd edition books, I just never actually played them), and I see it as one now with 5e. And yes, that "I thought they were very generous" thing is...

Oh, it's been, as noted, quite common. And in three out of those five cases, I explicitly warned the GM in question that this was a concern. Two of those were GMs I knew beforehand, so my warning might be heeded. It wasn't, either time, but I gave it a go.* The third was someone I did not know...

It is if the edition is designed with strong but unstated expectations and many GMs act exactly counter to those expectations. Funny, guess what I think one of the greatest problems with 5e is? Which, on that subject, 6e: convert every assumption into an explicit instruction. Lots of people...

True TPK = Characters are all straight-up Just Dead, never coming back. I've had this happen, at this point, five separate times playing 5e. Two of those times were with GMs I actually knew personally.

Okay. Now what happens if the fighters are under-equipped, because the GM thinks giving out items means you're running a "Monty Haul" campaign? Because they think giving out items is "bad GMing"? Because that's what I hear over and over and over again from OSR types. No magic items. No feats...

I'll have to take your word for it. My experience of 2e is through Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 1/2/SoA. In those games, combats were, just like in 3e and 5e, decided by spellcasters in advance. The non-spellcasters just cleaned up after.

As always, your experience is so different from mine I cannot meaningfully interact with what you have described. This is literally the antithesis of what I have, personally, experienced. Martials are caddies who clean up after the spellcasters have already decided which side has won. Sure...

Do they? I've literally never seen that. A true TPK is a death sentence for a campaign. I've seen that several times personally, and too many times to count secondhand. Never once seen the thing you describe--except, secondhand, in sandbox play. TPKs are a massive downer and put a terrible...

The one and only speedbump in all this is your specific call out of "Vancian" casting. That is the albatross around D&D's neck. As long as "Vancian" casting remains, I'm pretty well convinced that it will be impossible to make a D&D that achieves what you are hoping it will achieve: fixing the...

I mean, I can at least appreciate an adventure that actually tells players what they're going to experience if they don't play a powerful spellcaster.

I'm not talking about the novels here. I'm talking about a presumably-hypothetical context in which a "canon" adventure presents the heroes as, eventually, accepting something like "the enemy of my enemy is my ally", like how the Allies worked with the Soviets despite both sides hating each...

Right, but in signposting it as a "lesser evil", especially in fiction, it all too easily becomes whataboutism, just in a whitewashing kind of way. "Well whatabout how the Sorcerer Kings helped us kill the Dragon? Don't they deserve credit for that?" kind of deal.

And my point is that when you do do that thing, you kinda are letting it slide. You are creating an "out", a justification, no matter how tortured. That's pretty much the specific reason why Stalin is a "complex" figure, and Hitler is not. The former helped fight a "worse" person, and so we...

I'm not saying they didn't call out the genocides. I'm saying that when your choice is "several outrightly genocidal warlord tyrants who have zero compunctions about slaughtering thousands of innocents on the regular" or "outright extermination of essentially all life", the former becomes the...

Exactly. It's a choice between "the worst, most genocidal dictators in human history collectively" or "Aliens will literally exterminate all life on the Earth, yes, even deep-ocean life." When people like Stalin are the better option, when pragmatism says "well, we can let the genocide slide...

Presumably after, though to be frank I had not even considered this. I am not exactly the most adept at being flirtatious. (Rather the opposite, I'm afraid. Shyness, social anxiety, and being oblivious to cues.) Fair enough! As noted, my knowledge of this sort of thing is, if anything...

If this is "strongly hinting" at Dark Sun, maybe I need to be less subtle when I'm flirting. Because if this were flirtation, it would be me running up to an attractive person and planting a big ol' kiss on the mouth, and then walking off to get a drink. Sure, I didn't say I'm into them....but...