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The designers specifically told us that the point of the existing 5e mechanics was to make monsters be outscaled in the specific way that minions are: not a threat individually but definitely a threat as a group. Hence, you are simply wrong if you claim that they aren't trying to do this exact...

See, I actually agree with the stance that games can be a tool of moral education and investigation. I just still don't see how the thing you are targeting is in any way special. There are much, much, MUCH more important things to fix, if our goal is to eliminate the lingering stench of...

Whereas I find bad GMs stick to it nearly forever, because the kinds of personality traits that lead to a person being a bad GM are also the kinds of personality traits that lead to a person having zero or negative self-reflection, significantly inflated ego, and a desire for that ego to be...

Completely agreed. Actually quite funny to hear minions called "narrativist" when they're nothing of the sort! I chose not to respond to it only because I feared backlash for doing so.

Exactly. I think the problem may be that folks think "one hit point" means "crappy damage". That's literally what minions don't represent. Minions do genuinely dangerous damage--so every time you miss one, it's just (effectively) doubled in value for the enemy. It's the "zerg rush" strategy...

Well. It's nice to finally see folks call that out...twelve years late. I must beg your forgiveness for finding that a cold comfort at this point. Because if that's the case, literally every claim every person has ever made about 5e being somehow correctly designed for the current market...

So you are denying that the 5e designers based their design choices on the survey data? Or denying that their survey data is worth listening to? Because I assure you it is not more useful to you than it is to me if we say that we can reject WotC survey data as flawed and incorrect. Much the...

Let us assume that a million people are, or have ever been, GMs for D&D. This is, I think you would agree, a very low-ball number. Now imagine that 99.99% hold opinion A, and the remaining 0.01% hold opinion not-A. Despite not-A being held by a vanishingly small proportion of D&D GMs, 100...

It's literally the same thing. Pretending it doesn't matter. Yes, you are. And yes, it is--because that's what people genuinely want, and what the designers desire to make, and what the game has offered from quite early on. Unless you thought the whole multi-attack thing from early-edition...

That is what AlViking had demanded, though. That if something "becomes a minion", it is only and exclusively because things have been outscaled. Hence: anything strong early on MUST eventually scale down to minion status--killable in a single hit, if you can hit them. You've broken the...

Sure. I don't think I said anything that disagrees with that. I was responding to a criticism that claimed minions were specially worthy of exclusion, because they have the consequence of devaluing sapient lives by pretending that a large number of "demonized" enemies slaughtered without a...

Then you assert there are a lot of GMs not worth their salt. "Kitbashing" 99.99% of the time means "the rules are merely suggestions". You are extremely unusual in this regard. You are literally the only person I've ever met who treats their new rules as actual rules, and not as provisional...

"Take a different approach" in this case has to mean not being what D&D has been--either in thematics, or in mathematics. People want small numbers. People want it to be guaranteed that you outscale weak creatures. And people want absolute diegetic processes and never ever ever ever ever...

I am pretty confident it is not in jest.

The point remains. "This is bad because it means you're killing a lot of sapient lives really fast!" is a criticism that applies just as much to "oh, you scale past goblins really fast, those are just trash mobs". If valuing the sanctity of each sapient life is supposed to be a criticism of...

I find that idea precisely as baffling as the fonts. Something being on a colored background has literally nothing to do with whether you can employ creativity in your interpretation and application of the rules. It's not a matter of ignoring irrational crowd psychology. It's a matter of I...

So you're saying it needs to stop being D&D...? Because that's what I was talking about about "something has to give". The thing you asked for is mathematically not possible unless we have an outright exponential growth of both HP and damage. D&D has never has this, and is never going to have...

Problem: You are asking for a mathematical result that cannot be made to happen. That's the issue. You're asking for a mathematical impossibility. There simply isn't a mathematical scaling that ensures this consistently happens, all the time, every time, while still being a D&D-like game...

If the layout makes (generic) you think (generic) you can't change the rules, that is no one's fault but (generic) your own. Frankly, I find it utterly ridiculous that someone could see something with well-kerned fonts or whatever and think "this prevents me from making changes." That's...I...

Both the text and the designers explicitly support creative use of powers. A power with the fire keyword can be used to light things on fire. The fact that you didn't feel that should be true has no bearing on whether it is o rnot. It wasn't any more restrictive than 3e. That's a simple fact...