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HP is always an interesting razor, because both sides of the meat debate tend to firmly believe their approach is the obviously intuitive one, and look at the rest of the rules/fiction and say "but if we did it your way, all this stuff doesn't make any sense." The difference is whether they're...

Really? That feels like an easily solvable problem. Instead of baking scaling into the items, just make it a default calculated part of the character, maybe tied into attunement somehow. Give it a name like "resonance value" or something. If it's in a box on your character sheet and items were...

You're right about players for sure, that's always a problem, but my issue is with design. We have and might get more content, stuff for the existing rules/structure, but we're not going to get any development. 4e, for example, could quite reasonable use a reworking of monster scaling that...

I think this argument is always a bit too glib. None of these versions of the game are "done" from a design perspective, and the pivot to something new has generally closed off any further development. The problem is worst for 4e, but in general, each edition outside of those the OSR likes is...

Right, the sin is not having a "normal" non-empowered baseline, it's making that a player-facing class. It's very clear at this point the fighter is stuck in that box with little room to expand. Either they need offload all their power to external sources (items, player skill, maybe metacurrency...

This was a ground up reworking, targeted at pushing skills to be more on par with level appropriate magic. It has the benefit of being online and free: Tome of Prowess

Yeah, that's a definitional issue you're not going to solve through sheer force of insistence. I'm all in favor of a variety of different systems and power sources, but magic is definitionally anything that is impossible being achieved by using some extra-normal ability, and it's just a category...

Yeah, it's still pretty high magic, it's just that it's all equipment instead of class features. There's been a slow slide into moving more power from swords into fighter class abilities that accelerated suddenly in 4e, and didn't really ratchet back in 5e as far as people seem to think...

I think you'd need to do a more fundamental redesign to get to compromise. Dusk City Outlaws did a solid job. Luck is both a resource to modify rolls and effectively your HP pool, but the game is quite clear that while you have Luck to spend, you are absolutely not getting hit and avoid the...

Yeah, I don't think we're ever resolving that one. Personally I think what you're calling the Physicalist position has less to do with the hit point rules than it does assigning primacy to the attack rules; HP as meat is a necessary consequence of a "hit" being literally that. That, and I think...

I'm going to toss my two questions up here before I ramble out my initial design thoughts: Is there any game/supplement that does something like this I should be stealing from? Does this sound appealing to anyone other than me? Am I just wrong, and gambling with dice is actually the core of the...

Time for Passive Stealth!

I'm not actually sure I agree here, I think this is game design all the way down. The problem is that the gameplay loop, the point of interactions players are "supposed" to have with the game is generally insufficiently ambitious, or too generalized. The game design task does not end with making...

Right, this is the bit that's so weird and frustrating, where we're drawing this strange dischotomy between gameplay and detail, when that function of derivation and extrapolation is ideally a function of gameplay. If AC is a function of actual physical armor in some cases, a PC can want to get...

I really would prefer CR be an evaluative tool that provides a reasonable "what will happen if these two entities fight?" analysis. We should have a model that takes better inputs, hopefully more tailored to actual PC builds (and maybe when PC state entering the encounter). The initial mistake...

That's simply not the case. If there are general systems, players are perfectly capable and interested in extrapolating from them. Not knowing the precise details of any specific NPC does not preclude them from making inferences from what they do know. If nothing else, a player should be able to...

This is a weird stance. You realize the people on the "fighters need powersources" side are generally the same people on the "longswords should be a discrete thing" side, right?

Oh for sure this is a position already on retreating footing, but you know, better longswords than nothing.

No, I think that's too glib. I mean, just rhetorically, it's a bad choice because it encourages this: But more broadly, the function of each item in the game is different when you change the context. The design necessarily changes when you want an enemy to hit a target of 64 DPS, but a...

I don't think we need to couch this in the language of pretense. You could actually just do both; set targets for NPCs as opposition for encounter building and have internally consistent systems for weapons and scaling and so on. It's more design work, but creating a language for the game world...