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An evolution of the 5e engine with a different magic system; AND a setting gazetteer of Roshar and the greater Cosmere? <sadly opens wallet>

Looking at the 4e design decisions after reading both Wizard Presents books (the other is Races and Classes) provides quite a bit of clarity as to why things were developed they were. Those 2 books were fairly instrumental in moving me from being initially cool on 4e to becoming a 4e fan.

That's what we do in my games, right down to the magic item. (Although we called in the Purple Pendant of Plot Devices.)

Both concepts exist within the 4e monster manuals. There are a lot of minions that are meant to be "cannon fodder" for a more organized pack of monsters. There are also cases where a monster is presented as a standard in one case, and a minion in a second, higher level arrangement. Although...

No.

Yea, it's not a dissimilar approach. It works better in ShadowotWW because classes don't have stacking increases in power (each level just gives some more hit points, and a new ability), and characters gain new classes at levels 3 and 7. So it's equally viable to play a Changeling...

This is a little tangential from D&D, but you could have a setup where every PC picks two options at character creation from the list of classes, like a Fighter/Ranger or a Wizard/Cleric. Then make the non-human options their own class, so a player could make a Elf/Cleric or a Dwarf/Wizard...

For sure, I've absolutely done a similar thought loop. One of my tables is playing Dolmenwood (a B/X derivative) right now, which has race-as-class as an option but not the default. I'm playing an Elf (just an Elf), and it's pretty awesome.

There was 23 years between BG2 and BG3? Consider game development time nowadays, another 23 years seems correct, so a 2046 release for BG4, using the new 7e engine.

Yea, I don't think the problem is using "species-as-class" as a game construct in and of itself. That works fine, as you simply assume its a metagame assumption that applies only to PCs and the assumed NPCs that exist to be replacement characters when PCs die. The problem is some of the...

That's pretty much it. And even more importantly, I feel, is that narratives involving "henchmen" simply aren't the stories that 4e is trying to tell.

You know what? OK.

"Not become a slog" doesn't really fit into the creative agenda buckets, as @Pedantic mentioned before. It's more akin to bounded accuracy in 5e, or the decision to not allow advantage/disadvantage to stack and cancel. It's for the goal of "ease in play".

Having to provide a statblock for a color inclusion like a pet cat just so it can have a chance to kill an ogre seems "artificially restrictive" to me. (Not to mention that games in general are defined by rules which are restrictive, and all those rules are artificial.) If you're bound and...

Narrate something relevant as the DM, or ask for a check. The cat is background flavor, not something relevant to the resolution. It's 4e, not AD&D. Don't do that. And if you need to do it for some story reason, see the cat example.

Except in 4e, that isn't true. You can't automatically extract the meaning out of any one game mechanic and apply it more broadly to a larger subset of games. A game mechanic only has meaning in the context of the game system itself.

That’s fine. I’m not overly attached to the terminology. I just don’t think it’s strictly a “narrative” concept. What it definitely is, though, is oppositional to sim play.

I don't have my books on hand, but I remember some examples existing in the MM1 and MM2. I believe that's where the ogre example first arose, somewhere deep in the shadows of the Edition War.

It's probably more of a gamist construct, in that the stats are designed to maintain pacing in the challenge portion of the game. It does also lean "narrative" in the sense that the monster's stats are being used in the context of presenting a challenge to the players, not to establish the...

I didn't even think that was an argument. I'm reasonably sure that was the point. @Hussar may have a different take than me, which is fine, but I definitely had no problem using a standard block for level 1 goblins and making the same "group" of goblins into minions around level 6 or so.