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And that is a big factor, right there. If the mortality rate is sufficiently high, then the downsides of rolled stats become less and the positives become greater. It is win-win. The greater the mortality, the more attractive rolling becomes to most everyone. And in a long campaign, it can...

Exactly. Been there. Done that. It puts the players in an unanswerable dilemma: Isn't it actually Bad Roleplaying for the PCs to both pretend to not know what they (probably) know, and we the players to pretend our PCs do not know what we expect them to know? Or is it supposed to be Good...

I think one could make a strong academic argument that all Save DCs should be based on Cha, regardless of your magical tradition. As for Elves, more Cha and more mechanics that depend on Cha "feels" very Fey to me. Not that all (or any) elves necessarily needs to feel Fey, but D&D elves feel...

In 3e, there was a certain temptation to try and squeeze out 17 or 18 for your primary and see if you soft points could be mitigated. But maybe a 16 is good enough? Lots of choices. In 5e, your primary is usually 15 or 14, depending on the race you had in mind. Unless you are such a detailed...

That is the problem right there: rolling stats can fail badly in the fun department unless there are meta incentives that the DM carefully applies. So it is not necessarily that people who assert "rolling is fair" are right or wrong, but it is simply unknowable what they really mean until I...

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For a lot of players, what you say will hold true. The Designers (apparently) were intending to make the decision to not take a Feat and keep the PC simple and effective an attractive route. Of course, a lot of PCs will reach 20 at level 8. Is +2 to your secondary ability score better than a...

That argument cuts both ways. If you are the type of player who rises above these issues, then your stats are not so important, and it should be trivial to go along with what others are doing. If you are an imperfect human being who cares about the numbers, you care about the numbers. Perhaps...

In terms of rolling versus generated, I am perfectly happy to play almost anything for a short 1-3 session adventure, as long as the PC is memorable. Bad stats, good stats, weird stats, whatever. Whether rolling or buy or fiat gets us there is unimportant. For long running campaigns, I...

This. For previous editions by accidents of history, mundane (and mostly mundane) classes had their coolest tricks stuck in a rigid "A for X times per day, B for Y times per day, etc." framework. There was underlying logic there, except that it was easy to write down that way. The net result...

Exactly. So how many times the target has been resurrected in the past has only a 50% chance of mattering. Read it carefully. It may not be practical to keep at it, say, 9 times, but the rules allow the possibility.

I think the power of the Paladin lays in the Challenge. That is great for a party that is competent at team work, but it might feel pretty meh to the player. After you have used your Smite, the combat might be little more than an exercise is slowing down the opposition while doing a little...

If I understand the spell correctly, there is no upper limit on the number of times a particular character can be resurrected. But going that route is likely to cause horrific attrition on the population of high level clerics. So methinks powerful clerics need to hide their skill level. A...

I agree with reasoning. In fact, I would go further and suggest the logic of a flat math system implies flat DCs that care about neither spell level nor caster level. If you want more "damage" use a higher spell slot. Increasing the DC of the spell is strongly analogous to assuming that a...

I applaud the humor and odd mechanics as a brave attempt to capture the alien edginess of fey. Too often does fairy influence devolve into just a different shaded coat of paint in a hohum fantasy world. To me, fey should bring an uneasiness that they are playing by a different set of rules...

No, it really is not a problem with power return on investment. If the potential power gain is large the investment becomes mandatory, regardless of whether the price paid in personal resources is high or low. It so happens that in 3e the price is commensurately high (many feats stacked...

In a nutshell: It seems logical, but it turns out to not be more fun for anyone. On one hand, yes, it seems to make sense that my young would-be-Robin-Hood PC might practice much more with longbows (or perhaps just plain bows) more than swords. On the other hand, it tended to remove more fun...

IMO that particular "problem" was always a blatant flaw in the system -- the staying power of every party was tied by divine aprons strings to the ratio of non-clerics to clerics in the party, in a manner that had roughly zero precedent within the broader realm of myth and fantasy. My...

As for the the OP... I do not have a problem with "Wizards should be mostly about utility spells" itself. Whatever. But if it is an important enough design principle to guide the power level of an entire cadre of spells, it should be baldly stated right in the class description. If the...

Sounds like an argument against playing a classed-based system at all. If "responsive to their development choices" in the sense you are using it here is, in fact, so important, then D&D is an absurdly overengineered game system to bother with. For a player of any skill, being weak 1/3rd or...