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The one and only speedbump in all this is your specific call out of "Vancian" casting. That is the albatross around D&D's neck. As long as "Vancian" casting remains, I'm pretty well convinced that it will be impossible to make a D&D that achieves what you are hoping it will achieve: fixing the...

I mean, I can at least appreciate an adventure that actually tells players what they're going to experience if they don't play a powerful spellcaster.

I'm not talking about the novels here. I'm talking about a presumably-hypothetical context in which a "canon" adventure presents the heroes as, eventually, accepting something like "the enemy of my enemy is my ally", like how the Allies worked with the Soviets despite both sides hating each...

Right, but in signposting it as a "lesser evil", especially in fiction, it all too easily becomes whataboutism, just in a whitewashing kind of way. "Well whatabout how the Sorcerer Kings helped us kill the Dragon? Don't they deserve credit for that?" kind of deal.

And my point is that when you do do that thing, you kinda are letting it slide. You are creating an "out", a justification, no matter how tortured. That's pretty much the specific reason why Stalin is a "complex" figure, and Hitler is not. The former helped fight a "worse" person, and so we...

I'm not saying they didn't call out the genocides. I'm saying that when your choice is "several outrightly genocidal warlord tyrants who have zero compunctions about slaughtering thousands of innocents on the regular" or "outright extermination of essentially all life", the former becomes the...

Exactly. It's a choice between "the worst, most genocidal dictators in human history collectively" or "Aliens will literally exterminate all life on the Earth, yes, even deep-ocean life." When people like Stalin are the better option, when pragmatism says "well, we can let the genocide slide...

Presumably after, though to be frank I had not even considered this. I am not exactly the most adept at being flirtatious. (Rather the opposite, I'm afraid. Shyness, social anxiety, and being oblivious to cues.) Fair enough! As noted, my knowledge of this sort of thing is, if anything...

If this is "strongly hinting" at Dark Sun, maybe I need to be less subtle when I'm flirting. Because if this were flirtation, it would be me running up to an attractive person and planting a big ol' kiss on the mouth, and then walking off to get a drink. Sure, I didn't say I'm into them....but...

See above, but my response is essentially, "Will they?" With Aragorn, Gandalf, Frodo, etc. all dead, it seems that the War of the Ring becomes a conclusive victory for either Sauron or Saruman, if the latter is in fact capable of wielding the Ring properly. (I'm personally skeptical of this and...

I find it's a hard sell to come up with a completely different group that somehow manages to be all the things needed, without any of the connections the previous group had. If Frodo and the rest of the Fellowship die trying to take the Ring to Mount Doom...it almost certainly gets acquired by...

I do think there is a slightly greater temptation to prevent any loss that actually stings in a linear campaign. When there is no endpoint except what the players are interested in doing, a TPK is just a consequence of biting off more than they could chew. When you're Saving The World, a TPK is...

Personally, I'd call that an aspect of the callous. "I know it's terrible, but I want to avoid trouble" is a way to compartmentalize those feelings so you don't feel bad about not doing something. In the context of a D&D setting, I think this can be particularly useful if one wishes to have the...

Exactly. There is at least one more category. Possibly two. One is, "I couldn't be bothered." They are callous, not casually cruel--they are simply unmotivated by the suffering of others, or at least the suffering of others unlike them. Cruelty requires the desire to harm. Callousness simply...

I mean that literally actually is what I was just told. It literally just is "a deity of pure evil made them, all of them, and they're just like that now." There literally isn't more to it, which is one reason among several why I find the new lore so boring.

They had a single look and a single origin, yes. They actually DID something with that, instead of just having a generic "well I guess evil made them". That's the difference here. Variety solely for variety's sake with no effort or thought behind it doesn't add much. I personally didn't care...

There really doesn't. Especially since you're exploiting two different senses of the term here. One sense is "most likely" as a clear, unequivocal majority decision--what almost everyone does. The other sense is "most likely" as "well, technically, it's statistically almost certain that some...

This is a good point, and I think "rollercoaster" is a good word for the good kind of experience that isn't a railroad, but is cut from the same cloth, just as I had previously articulated "wasteland" as the bad kind of experience that isn't a sandbox, but is cut from the same cloth. Both words...

Let us see. Did @Crimson Longinus say that there should never be choices where there isn't an obvious, correct choice? Did they say that absolutely all situations ever must be so ambiguous, so utterly intractable, that it's impossible for anyone to even begin to claim that it has one solution...

Rule 34, SFW corollary. "If it exists, someone's into it." The larger the population grows, the closer to 100% true this statement becomes. Every new sapient soul is a new chance for some kind of unexpected niche interest...including romantic ones.