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All I can say is: Literally decades of video game design have consistently shown you are, in every way, wrong on this. TTRPG design isn't that different. The consistent complaints about 3e and 5e have both been exactly the thing you claim people won't complain about: that some things are...

Isn't "going beyond the rules" the exact same thing as the above, just being more secretive about it? You're not actually playing fair--you're pretending they're getting a fair shot, when they aren't.

Okay, but the issue there is the meaninglessness. Don't do meaningless encounters. That's why 4e aimed for making all encounters set pieces. I think that aim was slightly off the mark, but not because making set-piece encounters great was bad. It's because there's still some value in...

Most people. Because people understand that, when you incentivize something, that thing is now inherently more valuable. That's...what an incentive is. Then you need to understand that that is not what most people will do with a game. "Players will optimize the fun out of your game" is an...

Alright. The former strikes me as not really much of a reward--it's just an exchange, giving up short-term power for long-term power, in the context of destroying an opposite-alignment magic item. The latter, however, is a reward--and strongly resembles how Dungeon World did alignment. There...

Okay. Second part is...massive...so it's getting a separate post. My first thought: This is way the hell longer than the original. That leads to various issues. In brief: If every item is meant to look like this, items will take up massive page-space, making them unwieldy in production terms...

Why should it mean only one big encounter for the day? "Set piece" simply means that it's a big spectacle. It could be the last encounter of several, the first encounter of several, or anything in between. I find this assumption extremely confusing.

These are Google mail links. I cannot view them as I do not have access to your Gmail account. I assume you meant to link something else?

Well, I'm afraid you're almost certainly going to have to accept that some people like, not necessarily "wish lists", but aiming for particular goals over time, which will include items. It's unavoidable. The existence of cool things inevitably will mean some people--indeed, a lot of...

No, not really, because (as this very post shows), some folks want A, and some folks want Not-A, and some folks want "a thing that manages to be even more Not-A than the previous thing". I want more classes with well-defined thematic purposes (I have a specific set of exactly 12 classes which I...

Then we cannot actually design a game that won't create massive perverse incentives, which in turn will distort the story we tell about those things. Perverse incentives discourage people from playing archetypes they actually enjoy, and instead encourage them to play archetypes that give them...

I've never found it all that rich in most cases. What would you say makes it so? I find the Vampire/Werewolf/etc. stuff dramatically more rich, because it aims at something simultaneously more concrete and yet harder to exclusively quantify. That isn't to say I dislike it--as noted above, I...

Other than Hussar's games, I have no interest in playing 5e ever again. Quintice bitten, hexice shy. Or would that be "Fice bitten, sice shy"? Hmm... Could not possibly care less, other than for reasons that would just be me rehashing old arguments that aren't worth dredging up. Ah, pardon...

... Fine. Six to eight is there explicitly. Five I granted as a concession, to be generous. My apologies, for trying to give more grace than the text actually does. For God's sake, it's not even hard math. Champion, in 5.0, gets one extra crit every 20 attack rolls on average. For the first...

I wish that that method worked better. It worked extremely well in 4e--not perfect, especially if you used the rules to dynamically scale a monster to a new level--but extremely well in general. I mean, the long and short of it is that these GMs presumed PCs functionally took almost no damage...

Where does it say that? Because alllllll throughout D&D Next, that was explicitly the opposite of true. That magic items were explicitly NOT an expected part of the design, and were specifically always supposed to be 110% optional. The incessant celebrations of the magic item haters were one...

From actually checking the math. Three "deadly+" encounters simply cannot produce enough bonus damage output for a Champion to ever, even remotely, keep up with a Paladin--to say nothing of the Wizard, who will be eating well with all the enemies that must be present, or the singular enemies...

Saurman is a Maia, yes. He is, explicitly, Gandalf's lesser in important ways. Gandalf--Olorin--was the greatest, the wisest, of the Maia assigned to become Istari; he was originally the one chosen to lead the Istari, but Olorin declined, out of self-doubt. (His humility and compassion are the...

... Did you read the very thing you just quoted? Because you're literally talking about what I'm referencing here. It literally says, "six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day."

If I may ask: What game is left, if we cut out the focus on combat? Because, especially if we remove most of the unique/utility spells, there's...not much left in D&D other than combat.