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I am curious what you think that intention should be. I was under the impression that the lack of intentional design in 5e was something you prized, and the presence of intentional design in 4e was something you greatly disliked about it. Is that not the case? Edit: Meant to respond to this as...

All of these campaigns are from multiple years ago. I no longer have any of the materials for them. Sorry. Really? Are you really going to stickle over this? I had hoped the meaning would be obvious, but...okay. Fine. We did not reach level 4. We were already level 4 and more, but gained no...

Say it ain't so. Yes, I'm well aware you pride yourself on being a "Killer GM" who actively tries to crush the spirits of your players, being actively and openly cruel to them. I have little interest in discussing that.

I'm pretty sure all of them were 5, any that weren't would have been 4. I've never had a 5e group with 6 or more PCs. In my experience, the encounter-building rules for 5e are...well. I could voice my full opinion, but it wouldn't be nice. At all. So I'll just say that my experience thereof has...

Did it actually say that in those books? Because I was given to understand that it never actually said that. It implied it; one could easily infer it; but it was never, ever, actually said. And not actually saying it is a huge oversight. Not saying things is precisely what causes huge issues...

I like alignment...when it is used judiciously: with great care, deployed only when it is truly warranted. In this paradigm, 99.9% of non-adventurer humanoid-equivalent beings are Unaligned. They aren't True Neutral, they have no alignment. Because True Neutral involves a commitment to...

I think my words may have made it unclear. Nearly all 5e games I've played have started at level 1. With the exception of Hussar's group, literally 100% of those games have failed to reach level 4. I have never seen a 5e game that (a) started out at level 1 and (b) actually reached level 4. I...

Level 1 or 2 for most, level 3 for one. Other than with Hussar's group, I have never seen a 5e game that started out at level 1 and actually reached level 4--ever. TPKs, gross GM misbehavior, group just losing interest and jumping ship, or other similar issues have always killed it before level...

"Hobby friends" would be a good descriptor of the two groups this happened to where all the players were people I knew beforehand. Strangers for the rest. So...yeah. Let's just say I have seen a consistent pattern (broken only by Hussar!) of GMs who did not handle this sort of thing well, at...

For my own self, and I know many will find so much to criticize about this: 4e was a great structure presented badly. 5e actively tried to avoid anything that smelled like 4e, to the point of repeatedly reinventing the wheel, sometimes completely unnecessarily (e.g., 4e crits are just flat...

All I can say is, I never had this experience with 3e or 4e. 5e? I have had it, as stated, pretty consistently. Hussar's group is the only one I've been in that hasn't suffered this or some other problem that ended the campaign in relatively short order. There's a reason I am pretty critical...

How long has your group been playing together? In every one of these cases, this was the first time these players were playing together. As stated, some of them were (varyingly distant) friends I had already had for other reasons, but they were not "gaming friends", they were "people I met...

Yes, I'm aware it didn't. I see that as a pretty significant problem. I saw it as one then (my very very very first introduction to TTRPGs was the 2nd edition books, I just never actually played them), and I see it as one now with 5e. And yes, that "I thought they were very generous" thing is...

Oh, it's been, as noted, quite common. And in three out of those five cases, I explicitly warned the GM in question that this was a concern. Two of those were GMs I knew beforehand, so my warning might be heeded. It wasn't, either time, but I gave it a go.* The third was someone I did not know...

It is if the edition is designed with strong but unstated expectations and many GMs act exactly counter to those expectations. Funny, guess what I think one of the greatest problems with 5e is? Which, on that subject, 6e: convert every assumption into an explicit instruction. Lots of people...

True TPK = Characters are all straight-up Just Dead, never coming back. I've had this happen, at this point, five separate times playing 5e. Two of those times were with GMs I actually knew personally.

Okay. Now what happens if the fighters are under-equipped, because the GM thinks giving out items means you're running a "Monty Haul" campaign? Because they think giving out items is "bad GMing"? Because that's what I hear over and over and over again from OSR types. No magic items. No feats...

I'll have to take your word for it. My experience of 2e is through Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate 1/2/SoA. In those games, combats were, just like in 3e and 5e, decided by spellcasters in advance. The non-spellcasters just cleaned up after.

As always, your experience is so different from mine I cannot meaningfully interact with what you have described. This is literally the antithesis of what I have, personally, experienced. Martials are caddies who clean up after the spellcasters have already decided which side has won. Sure...

Do they? I've literally never seen that. A true TPK is a death sentence for a campaign. I've seen that several times personally, and too many times to count secondhand. Never once seen the thing you describe--except, secondhand, in sandbox play. TPKs are a massive downer and put a terrible...