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There's an obvious corollary to this, though... The farther that the game migrates from the tropes that we recognize and desire, the more justified we are in saying, screw it, I'm not a customer anymore. Speaking of which, I'd love to see some good data on adoption rates of 5.5 vs 5e. I'm 100%...

With regards to the failure of 4e to meet what management's goals were for the edition, and it's deleterious effect on the market penetration generally, I think 4e was too much too soon, but that doesn't mean that it didn't have some good ideas. It's interesting to see 4e ideas gradually coming...

Only if it sucks and underperforms.

Your claims don't even rise to the level of a Wikipedia check. Mike started as a designer in 2005, and was part of the "flywheel" design team that led the design from that point until the launch in 2008. That's why we take what he says about 4e more seriously than what you say; he was there and...

Would help if you'd directed your strawman somewhere else first. Nobody says, including the interview with mearls, that 4e was full of WoW mechanics... except you, complaining about the nonexistent people who didn't say it. Don't bring baggage from some other conversation into every one that has...

That's a totally different issue. The whole point of will they won't they is to see them actually get together. They're just as disappointed if they never resolve it. The problem there is that once the main question of the metaplot (will they, won't they) is resolved, what else is there to do...

It's pretty simple. Reduce monster hp, but increase monster damage.

I came across less of a suggestion to the general royal you and clearly a specific statement to me personally that I needed to GM more before I complained about what goes into GMing successfully. Don't know how else to read that. Which is fine, just not really applicable. I feel like maybe I'm...

Not sure how that's pushing back. I don't disagree with that at all. That said, a lot of people aren't really all that self-aware of their biases in how to play or how to run, so it doesn't occur to them that they're not being communicative about things that they never even think of not assuming...

You left out an important operative word. "Skill play focus minded GMs". Skill and play go together, because skilled play is a specific playstyle. One that's not super popular since about the early 80s, but pockets of it still linger here and there. The whole classic playstyle is specifically...

This isn't about being communicative. This is about the GM style that suggests that the world is the world, and it's not the GMs job to engage with the characters, it's the characters' job to engage with the world and bring the characters that are optimized for the challenges that are out there...

OK. I started GMing in 1982, since then I've GMed more than I play. Is that a long enough while to have an opinion here?

Yes, clearly. That's true for almost any endeavor, so not really relevant here, though. The point of this thread is to talk specifically about a practice that's somewhat common in the D&D GMing universe that I think is hot garbage and should be done away with, with a tangent about playstyles...

See, and that's the whole entire essence of my "hot take." That whole paradigm is what I call passive-aggressively punishing the players for not building the party that the GM thinks that they need to have in order to succeed. That's not a GM worth his salt. That's very, very, very bad GMing. So...

Exactly. A lot of GMs aren't worth their salt, though.

I'm pretty sure hot take is what the cool kids were saying a few years ago, not today.

No, it's not a sandbox at all, it's just that the "narrative" isn't fixed and deliberately subject to character input. It doesn't lack focus and it isn't casual; the focus is on immersion and roleplaying rather than on narrative or dungeon-crawling. It's reacting to the same things that trad was...

If that's explicitly part of the campaign as pitched to the group, then yeah. I've rarely seen pitches like that, however. It's usually more a case of the GM simply can't imagine a different way to play, so when you don't get someone who's specialized in turning undead or disarming traps, the GM...

Indeed, that's why it's a hot take. I'm saying that I'm going against a well-established grain that I dislike. I actually think referring to story and narrative is a red herring. It's more about immersion and roleplaying, and ditching (at least to some degree) the tactical dungeon-crawling...

But still a topic that I'm quite interested in! You may be right; I could be the one with a perception bias, because I don't really like 5e all that much, I play it kind of reluctantly, but I also play it with people who are not at all neotrad. Although I do have a couple of Millennial/zoomers...