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That game is a good example of the broader knock-on effects of 4e's unique status. You get hit both for being not 4e enough or for drawing from it as a design well at all.

Really, what is character death but missing a whole bunch of turns?

Should the DM respond with "yes, you have 3/4s Cover" or with "yes, it's appropriate to hide now, if you can find 3/4s cover?" The first conditional is written as though the only thing you'll do is ask the DM directly about the action, the second is written as though you'll ask about the...

You're actually calling for double randomness here. Presumably it's already possible to fail the roll for information and have to proceed without it, which is already one injection of randomness, potentially followed by another if you succeed, but the information is invalid.

I like to go a step further, and treat knowledge generally (especially for monsters) as a passive skill that I as the DM roll against. Whatever DC I've set for the information (between 10-20 for monsters, generally), I subtract 10 from, and then roll against the PC's score.

Generally Rodney Smith and Co on Watch it Played are the best go-to rules explainers. My group has settled into a pretty comfortable routine; one player watches a video and reviews the rules ahead of time for the teach, if it's a heavy game, we all skim/read the rules separately before we meet...

I don't actually think that is the same. The bit that's frustrating isn't the lack of outcome, it's the lack of agency. It's one thing to make a decision or take a risk that doesn't pay out, it's quite another to not get to make a decision at all.

I think the process has been going on longer than you suggest here, but it might be accelerating. I'd point to the perceived lethality of swords and melee combat in general going down as a nod toward the D&D milieu's impact.

I think we can disagree about whether there should be a universal spellcasting framework and still agree this stat block is a bad expression of both schools of design. It's wasteful and unhelpful if it was trying to use a universal spell reference, and woefully incomplete if it wasn't.

That is just astonishingly the worst of all worlds. I'm quite pro universal and consistent spellcasting rules, but then you would drop the weird reminder text, put in calculated numerical bonuses and maybe PHB page references if you actually wanted to support that.

I'd look at both classic roguelikes (or modern games in a similar style, like Caves of Qud) or immersive sims, like Fallout: New Vegas for video game sandboxes. They are both more powerful, in that they can adjudicate the interactions of more complicated systems, and weaker than TTRPGs, in that...

Wouldn't the ultimate outcome be less reskinning and more new monster creation? I don't know that's necessarily a problem, especially if the game features reasonable monster design tools. Personally, I'd actually love to see more guided reskinning guidelines in general, laying out more clearly...

I'd argue that's more of an aesthetic constraint than a design one. 3.x's was a game with, effectively, 12(ish, humanoids worked differently) monster classes and lots of power offloaded into species, plus sideways progression either via templates or traditional classes. The design constraint was...

I think it's actually possible to have the cake and eat it here, particularly in a world of digital tools. The key is just expressing your NPC/monster archetypes (skirmisher, brute, etc.) in the same mechanical terms that PCs use, adjusted appropriately for level. I imagine the approach would be...

Oh, that's also not the case. 3.x was all about derived monster stats from fixed type norms; you were absolutely supposed to add 3 Fighter levels to that orc, pick an appropriate set of feats and have a skirmishing archer. The criticism was not that the PC/NPC transparency or "naturalistic"...

If you don't set PC/NPC design transparency as a design goal from the outset, then 4e's choices are sort of an inevitable outcome, assuming you do the design work well and don't intentionally shoot for minimalism. Monsters exist to show off a few abilities, you want a variety of different...

I tried another round of shrubs. Doing a 2:1 fruit to sugar maceration, left for 2 days, then filtered through cheesecloth and mixed 2:1 syrup to vinegar. I'm very happy with this process, they've come out much cleaner and balanced then some other methods I've tried. Blueberry, kiwi and...

That is the crux of the issue. Really feels like it needs to be an neither or both situations for TH/MM.