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You can have different stories just fine. You don't need different mechanics for that. Mechanics represent how things function. A magic sword works the same, regardless of whether you inherited or bought it. And in your HP example, the magic of all those characters works in similar way and in a...

Whilst I don't think D&D as whole has become steampunk, and it lacks many significant aspects of the genre (such as prevalent use of steam tech,) these pictures certainly read very steampunky to me. D&D has never had coherent aesthetics, though I feel that recently we the presentation has crept...

Sorcerer and Warlock subclass thematics are very similar. It is just whether the thing was a patron or an ancestor. I don't think we need to have different classes and subclasses for demonpact/demonblood, feypact/feyblood dragonpact/dragonblood etc. Thematically it is a caster with that flavour...

I mean there is literally a poll running on about starting levels on this forum and it seems a lot of people have no issues with starting at a higher level.

Zero to hero is the point of having a level based game. I certainly don't always want that, but there are games other than D&D. Now you of course can start at a higher level in D&D too, but the basic idea that the levels mean significant increase of power is a fundamental building block of the...

But in HP wizards are born with special magical spark that allows them to learn magic and the jedis are trained to use their 'magic' since childhood. But if that pact gives you magical knowledge, how doesn't that just make you a wizard with the patron as a tutor? Or if the pact alters you to...

There is really no coherent distinction and it bugs me. It also is weird that warlock for some reason has the most unique casting mechanics in the game, but there is really no reason why they would behave so differently. I always felt that warlock mechanics of always-on magical features and...

I never understand how so many people seem to be scandalised by the traditional Athasian second breakfast. D&D is already full of killing, but eating what you kill is at least more eco-friendly. Fits the themes of the setting perfectly.

This is why I endeavour to have my houserules determined before the campaign begins, so that I can tell them to the players and they can make informed character building decisions.

Not saying the game is perfect, far from it, but I am not surprised that you complaints based on your highly anomalous experience do not gain much traction. You are wanting to fix an issue most people simply do not have.

@EzekielRaiden I'm not terribly interested getting deeper into guideline/rule semantic quagmire. But I agree with you that overriding the rules should be rare, and if one finds that they need to constantly do so to get the results they want, then the rules are bad — at least for the purpose one...

One might argue that rules of a game tend to be pretty inviolable. Like we cannot just decide in chess that a bishop can this time move diagonally because they do a cool stunt. But we allow that sort of exceptions with RPG rules all the time, which makes them more like guidelines rather than...

No. They mean that things will usually work in certain way, with the caveat that there might be some exceptions.

Yes, at least 2014 ones are terrible, but they are terrible to the direction of things being way too easy...

I think 4e pretty clearly proved that.

I don't think this is really playing a roleplaying game in a meaningful sense. It is just some combat puzzle solving.

I really don't think issue with TPKs is mainly about "losing progress." It is about disconnect in the narrative. So what you do if you want to continue, is to find a narrative threat that connects the new characters to what the old ones were doing.

That's an utterly terrible idea. It totally destroys any tension caused by dangerous situations.

So my experience is that past fourth level 5e characters are pretty much unkillable, and certainly are not even close of any sort of genuine danger if using 2014 encounter building guidelines, you can comfortably go way past deadly. Yeah, before that they are somewhat more fragile, but you're...

In my decades of playing RPGs, this has happened once, (aside some horror style scenarios where “everyone dies horribly in the end” is the point,) and it was at the very end of the campaign at the final confrontation where one PC decided to join the enemy. It might have happened in some games we...