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IMNSHO, their "thing" is wilderness survival. A ranger is your guy if you need to get through the pass in a blizzard without freezing to death, find food before your group starves, escape pursuit in the underbrush, or get across a canyon. Unfortunately D&D has never focused on these types of...

Of course. The DM's job is to provide an entertaining challenge. Anything else is a guideline at most. You are free to use any type and strength of opponent you wish to make that happen.

When you say "strength based rogue," I think "thug", a gang enforcer. The first thought off the top of my head is an ability called "cruel strike". The rogue doesn't just want to defeat his enemy, he wants to hurt them, and he's very good at causing pain. On a critical hit or a successful...

On magic vs martial, it's slightly more complex than just stronger vs weaker. In 1E, magic-users were dominant combatants, but they had significant weaknesses, especially spell interruption. They needed the martial characters to cover their weaknesses or they were orc meat. In a 1E fight...

I think the OP's only hope is that the one guy he quoted does not reflect the view of everyone else in the group. Poll your group and find out if it does. If so, you're not going to be playing 5E with these guys. You're not going to convince them they're wrong about the game - the points...

No, I was thinking you were talking about magnetic fields projected from the hilt. The idea came from a toy problem from my fields class, a very long time ago. Already checked the math on attracting and repelling wires, it works. Only took a few seconds. A single layer of carbon bonded to...

Easy fix: an insulated ring around the hilt with a very high static charge will keep the whole things stiff. This one I consider up in the air. Once the strand loses rigidity it has very little momentum because of its mass. But there is also very little resistance to its cut because it's so...

As usual, walk away from the problem for a day or so and an answer becomes obvious - this just popped into my head while I was doing something else. Parallel wires with currents moving in opposite directions repel each other electromagnetically. Use monomolecular superconducting wire with a...

Directionality is tricky but doable with current technology. I'm a controls engineer, and I've built controllers for flexible membrane telescopes that are similar in principle but not specifics. I think the harder problem is making sure your don't attract or repel other items. Having your...

Insulated gloves and boots fix that, but you'll still have to be careful. Bring an uninsulated portion of your body near something grounded and you're in trouble. Plausible is a pretty subjective word. We're talking SF, not something that can be built today. I think it's plausible that...

I only played Skyrim, so that's all I can really comment on. You have a pretty good list so far. I'd take out the scaling enemies with level bit - that's a video game feature more than a specific Skyrim feature and RPGs are better off without it. I'd also include - crafting your own gear -...

Well of course it will arc. I was thinking of a large power source that can keep it continuously charged despite the frequent loss. Nothing we can do today but it's SF. Taser effects on a hit and scary sparks are a bonus. Thinking about it now, it shouldn't actually take much charge...

Niven's variable sword are close. A monomolecular filament held stiff by a forcefield, IIRC. You could make it more realistic by dropping the forcefield and putting a bow behind it like a giant cheese slicer. Or postulate that you can charge the thing and it stays stiff by electric...

Kind of tough to tell from a sample size of one planet. Still consider that there are animals we consider capable of a certain level of cognition: whales, dolphins, squids, elephants. We're unique on the planet but not entirely alone. It doesn't take any great leap of imagination to think...

May favorite came from Piratecat's story hour: You're an embarrassment to dragons everywhere! (Said to a dragon, obviously)

I don't see a particular problem with a player who doesn't want to speak up much in character. They can have their PC be an introvert, too. There, they're roleplaying. If someone insisted on rolling for social interaction rather than roleplaying it out, that would be a real problem, but...

Experiments don't happen unless someone looks at what's there and says "hey, that doesn't look right" first.

That first bit's not true at all. A successful scientist has to be a PR person, politician, and marketer to win funding and other resources for their work. Convincing people of the value of their work is part of their job, and if they can't do it they don't get far. Politics in academia can...

Scientific "fact" should be poked at. Just because someone does some work or claims they're an expert doesn't make them omniscient. Frex, we've been taught for the last 30? 40? years that eating eggs is unhealthy because of the cholesterol. Guess what, just kidding! The latest study shows...

My main limiter is time, not group, so I'll just list a couple I've always wanted to play but never gotten to Shadowrun Ars Magica Blue Planet The One Ring Amber Exalted