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You said nobody could learn certain kinds of skills. Hence, there could not be schools, because...people don't learn them. Are you now saying there are schools Fighters can attend to become (say) sword-saints, where they can learn Aura Cutter or whatever once they've refined their skills enough...

See, I don't even think it's "dark ages" per se. I think the key difference is that D&D went from something kinda-sorta-ish like realpolitik and logistics, to something kinda-sorta-ish like romanticism and adventure. Folks who like realpolitik see romanticism as gaudy, garish, childish, a...

What I'd say is, it was part of the completely BS pop-history hodgepodge that people mistakenly think is "Medieval". It has ladies in 12th century fashion living in 9th century castles swooning over 16th century plate-armored knights while lords practicing 17th century political philosophy...

My problem with the question is a single word. "Default". The default game is not steampunk, for a variety of reasons. It's not even Victoriana, which would be (in a sense) "steampunk" with less steam and no punk. But I do think that D&D is, shall we say, sprawling out from where it started...

13th Age. Really truly excellent game design--that is definitely not a narrative game. Unless you consider 4e to be a narrative game, which I'm fairly sure you would not. Great example thereof: They actually solved the 3.5e Druid Problem. That is, the problem that the 3rd edition Druid is both...

Mighty Deeds. Not something they get access to instantly, something they grow into. A Mighty Deed at (say) 5th level might be holding up the portcullis so all your friends can get out safely, then slipping under yourself. Something no living human on Earth could do, but which is only the...

And almost none of them will ever have any interest in starting. Which is the bigger thing, since (remember) Lanefan's arguments often boil down to "well if we force them to play X way, they'll just go along with it and then we'll change how people choose to play." Which is, perhaps...

Well, if I were taking the concept seriously, I imagine it would draw upon and/or represent all the weird, amorphous, deceptive denizens of the dungeon, but in a way that grants them sapience, agency, and the ability to join society-at-large. Just as dragonborn draw upon and/or represent the...

But that isn't actually balance. Like even in a long-term sense, it's not actually balance. It's literally not long-term balance, because in the long term, things become more unbalanced than they were before. Instead, it is, at absolute best, temporary middle-term balance: a range of levels...

My bet, as I've stated before, is somewhere between (very roughly) 4 and 7 years after launch. Hence why I've said if we haven't heard relatively reputable rumors/"my secret sources"-type stuff that there's a 6e playtest in the works by the time we've hit the 5 year mark (so late 2029/early...

Good luck on convincing Lanefan about this. I've tried before, you can see the lack of fruits of my labor.

And that's precisely what I'm calling out. You are taking one thing as a bedrock assumption so fundamental it doesn't need to be discussed, while rejecting the other explicitly, without justification. It's just...."well of course that's how it is, it just...is!" That, that thing right there, is...

Ah yes, because no one can ever criticize a game they haven't run, but have played numerous times. Such pushback is, frankly, ridiculous. I can read easily enough, and I've played 5e many, many times at this point. More than I've played 4e, both in terms of total session length and in terms of...

I agree that combat tended to be slow (though some of that had to do with certain very specific unfortunate design choices in early 4e), but the way to fix that isn't to trash the system that works well, it's to create something like my "Skirmish" concept. That is, combats that are...

Oh, I'm quite well aware of it. I call it the "guy at the gym" problem. If it's not something they can imagine a guy at the gym doing, it's not possible for a Fighter. Even though doing some of the things D&D characters do is literally beyond Olympic Athlete level stuff. It's a pox upon the...

Not very many, but mostly because I only got started on GMing too late to have any audience for 4e (and wanted a system somewhat lighter for friends who had never touched a TTRPG before.)

I would only GM 5e if I was paid above minimum wage for it.

You'll forgive me for not particularly having much faith in WotC's ability to write adventures that in any way successfully teach this.

Why not? You allow it with one kind of supernatural power. Why not another?

I don't think either one is strictly a problem in isolation. The problem is trying to make them both speak the same proverbial language.