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Just to get back to this briefly: I think what you're saying can be true, but there's also an aesthetic or maybe a design question about how we decide what a game is 'about'. Like: if I want to create a game which is an allegory of the German Peasants' War, does that mean that I create mechanics...

Something like this.

I'm following this with interest, since it's something I've pondered on and off for years without reaching any satisfactory conclusion. I will say that express the weight of social structures in framing is likely the easiest bit. Especially if background material drawn from the setting and the...

Yeah, I think a key point here is not to try and emulate D&D w/r/t how resolution works. That said, I think the '5 dice rolls and seven steps' stuff only comes into play if you insist on doing everything using stochastic methods, like dice, for each step discretely. If a player says 'I want to...

That sounds like exactly the sort of thing I do want in my games! Players actually engaging with the fiction rather than rolling dice until numbers go down. Naturally, you can't do this in a system with big HP pools like D&D, as others have said. I'm actually working on a system in which I use...

Yeah, the number of 'can I attack with a two-handed weapon while grappling someone?' threads on places like reddit attest to the fact that a large part of the community cannot or will not incorporate the fiction into play in many situations. I think we'll see the new edition (or whatever they're...

I think a lot of issues with help are resolved if you treat it the same way that all skill use is supposed to be treated: the player has to actually describe what their character is doing [edit: just saw @Bill Zebub 's post above, which says basically the same thing]. As a DM, you just need to...

I (extremely reluctantly) voted for learning from experienced players or some of the better streamers. The books just aren't very useful, in my experience. I haven't played the starter sets: do they provide more/different advice than the PHB/basic rules?

I think a problem discussions like these run into is that a class can be a lot of things simultaneously. It's a set of mechanical abilities, but also something that evokes a character archetype, and maybe also some kind of character goals or attitudes. 5e is kind of a mess on this front. For...

That's pretty good. I bet you could up the ante and make it two 'creatures', with a common health pool but each head rolling its own saves for conditions, and a legendary action for the second head.

This is a persuasive interpretation, but I'm not sure why that the second bit is buried in the DMG. Trying to divine what the designers were thinking from the layout of those books is a path that leads to madness, though... I'm actually a big fan of the 'oracular' function of dice for revealing...

Thanks for the responses, everyone! It's interesting to see both variety and similarities. My own opinion is that 'meaningful consequences for failure', per the DMG, is a bit vague, especially when juxtaposed with the PHB's claim that checks are made 'when the outcome is uncertain' (or words to...

A question for 5e DMs out there (and, I suppose, players of 5e DMs). When a PC fails at something, what happens in your game? For example: the rogue fails to pick the lock. The bard fails to seduce the queen (or the barkeep, or whomever). The party fails to find a path through the mountains...

Advantage/disadvantage is nice, but it just isn't granular enough to be used for everything. Basic stuff like cover and buffing spells have used distinct modifiers from the beginning (a lot of spells also roll bonuses, which is unbelievably fiddly). Ideally, they should restrict advantage to...

I cannot fathom how, in the year 2022, anyone can believe that sales and popularity aren't driven principally by marketing concerns like hype, brand loyalty and recognition, and glossy products.

The thing that made the spell schools interesting in AD&D was that you had to make hard choices about which schools you wanted to take and leave. I don't think that really matches the current WotC ethos of giving spellcasters options on top of options.

I wonder how third parties will interact with D&D-as-a-service, if and when it gets to that point. Seems like 3pp might be getting cut out of the action to some extent. 'One D&D' doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, either. People using the OGL generally use '5th edition' as a euphemism for...

The damage increase is pretty small, and you have to give up a shield to get it. I think the bigger issue is that it doesn't work thematically with sneak attack. But, neither do rapiers. Actually, some kind of iaijitsu thing would be much more apt than bumbling around trying to stab someone in...

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree about the 5e DMG. My experience is that it's mostly worthless as both a teaching device and a set of procedural tools. As a toolbox: you can look at various use-cases (intrigue, wilderness exploration, dungeon-delving) and I think in every case...

Makes sense to me. Adds flavour without changing balance much. Dex doesn't really get a big boost compared to shield and rapier. Dex being too good in general is a distinct issue.