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You prefer swingy games. Okay. I think you're putting the cart before the horse in the rest of your post. The game isn't less swingy so that they can have encounter guidelines. 3e was a wildly swingy game but it had tight encounter guidelines (going even so far as to prescribe wealth by level)...

I don't want to take out the fall on hard times piece. Hard to understand how you took that when in my next paragraph I describe setbacks that are literally falling on hard times. I am reframing the fall on hard times piece from being defined by losing levels and items to story setbacks. I...

I still disagree with your premise, that it's easier to make a hard game easy, than it is to make an easy game hard. Some people did assert that to be the case, but they didn't give much to support it beyond their own opinions. I showed how you can make an easy game hard. Add in the features I...

Well, the argument has been for it to be in the game by default, which kind of means it is being forced on folks, whether they like it or not. At the very least, they have to opt out as a group, and that entails not being able to use certain creatures, unless alternate stat blocks are added...

Right, I would liken level drain to a video game where you lose significant progress when you fail (Rogue-likes). Once you've achieved significant progress, it can be extremely stressful. Which can be fun in its own way, but is also a massive turn off for some. In Rogue, once you die that's...

It invalidates your progress by literally removing the progress. Yes, I wouldn't play in such a game. If you like it, that's fine too. I wasn't saying otherwise. I was explaining why I believe a majority of gamers don't want those effects in their games. Not why those groups that do like them...

IDK, he was the one who responded to me saying that sometimes 6 orcs are a breeze for his party and sometimes 6 orcs are a near TPK. I was responding to that. I see nothing wrong with a sandbox style game, but concepts like too easy or hard make even less sense in that environment. As you say...

Those characters are the same in the same sense that twins are the same. In other words, they may be indistinguishable to some people, but fundamentally they're not the same. If twin A dies, twin B living doesn't mean that twin A is still alive. Twin A is dead, obviously.

Making it to the end of a campaign with a character isn't an assumption that can be made in the games I play in either. Of the campaigns I've made it to the end of in the past 10+ years, there are only two character of mine that I can recall who made it all the way. That's out of a lot of...

So you're saying that the same exact character, same sheet, same everything, is dead at one table but they take him to another table and he's alive? Or do you mean that they make a similar character with the same name and personality, and play them at different tables? The former sounds like...

So, when this happens, do you note what the difference was? Perhaps in the former case you couldn't roll above a 5? Perhaps in the latter case you rolled half a dozen crits in the same encounter? Maybe I'm confusing you with a different poster, but weren't you the one who just claimed to have...

I strongly disagree. RPGs are not like Snakes and Ladders or Poker. There's a sense of continuity to RPGs that these other games lack. There's no real character or story to lose at. There is winning and losing, but it's fundamentally mechanical. It's not like poker player 1 is role playing his...

Death can be an unsatisfying conclusion to a character's story, but it is a conclusion nonetheless (or it might simply be a speed bump, if resurrection is on the table). All of those hours spent playing that character are still there. Whereas the mechanics that I referred to as punitive are...

You can up the challenge however much you want. If four orcs can't challenge them, try six orcs. If six orcs still don't cut it, try eight orcs. Eventually, finding the sweet spot is virtually inevitable. Frankly, I calibrate the difficulty of the game for each different party I run for...

I disagree. Increasing lethality in the game is effortless. Throw a dozen Tarrasques at a first level party. Game over, irrespective of edition. What's difficult, and what earlier editions did very poorly, was helping DMs who didn't necessarily want to constantly wreck their party. High...

To me this is like instituting roll 3d6 in order as the default method, just so that I can be the "good guy" when I say that's silly and go with 4d6, arrange as desired. I certainly don't want that or consider it beneficial. I don't think WOTC should be designing the game around the idea of...

I think we need to draw a distinction between a system that allows such costs to exist, vs a system that doesn't include such costs in the default. I would say that 5e is a case of the latter, not the former. You can absolutely make a monster that level drains, or ages characters, or destroys...

Yeah, I think that, particularly with the heroic vs pragmatic axis, it's often a social contract. Ideally it's how everyone wants to play. But sometimes it isn't, which is why you sometimes hear DMs who want to run pragmatic oriented games give the advice, "Just keep killing the characters...

It was D&D 3.5. The DM was experienced but it was his first time running 3rd and he didn't have a good feel for it. He wasn't explicitly trying to kill us, just challenge us, but he had a habit of overestimating what we could actually handle. But, there was basically an unspoken gentlemen's...

There are heroic games with high deadliness and heroic game with low (even no) deadliness. There can certainly some correlation between deadliness and resource scarcity, but it's not the end all be all. A DM who creates difficult encounters but pulls their punches to avoid killing characters...