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TL;DR: Mearls and other design team members were doing a game (recorded for a livestream or podcast, can't remember which) as a promo for 5e. They had a basic but decent party and took on like three ghouls vs their IIRC five characters. The ghouls absolutely slaughtered them, completely taking...

I'm afraid I can't see whomever you quoted, @payn. But my point was that, for all the effort they poured into (allegedly) making the thing everyone wanted, they openly admitted to several things they considered blunders, and 5.5e happened specifically because they failed to nail several classes...

Not just consumed nostalgia: instant nostalgia. We're having remakes of shows, games, movies, etc. that aren't even that old. How to Train Your Dragon got a live-action remake...only fifteen years after it originally came out. Like there are literally people who went to see it in theaters as...

Folks have, very recently, told me that this is not true and that the playtest really was there to test things to see if they would work. That it wasn't performative. So...like I completely agree with you! But there are people, even today, who adamantly insist that this isn't true and that the...

I really don't think there's any "self-fulfilling" about it. Performance checks have never been common in any game I've played. Ever. Doesn't matter what system. I've literally never even heard of a GM calling for lots of performance checks prior to @MostlyHarmless42 saying so just now in this...

Except they literally haven't done what I'm talking about. They literally don't do actual, statistical testing. If they had, the "ghoul surprise" could not happen, because they would have already known, from doing simulations, that saving throws fail far too often and need to be bolstered...

And yet....

I really don't think it's wise to be blithe about this. This is a common and thorny design trap in all sorts of game design--the problem of having an action that has the risk of being either so overwhelmingly optimal there's no reason ever to not take it, or so pointless that there's never a...

Wonderful news: we can! Less wonderful news: It requires starting with clear and specific design goals, creating designs which attempt to implement those goals, and then doing rigorous and specifically statistical testing to ensure that those goals are met. To the best of my knowledge, neither...

But that's precisely my point. You are calling it out as bad. I am not interested in arguing with you about that. My interest, here, is simply that you know what you believe is good design; you know that these designers did not practice that idea; you know that they could have, but chose not...

You absolutely can. It just requires actual playtesting, not the performative nonsense that WotC (and Paizo!) have been billing as "playtesting". I'm not doing that, so...not a concern. That is far, far from the best designers can do. That's straight-up pretending designers are somehow utterly...

I think it's perfectly possible to design a game where both concerns can work. It just has to be an active, and rigorously tested, design goal from the beginning that both attrition-focused gameplay and tactics-focused gameplay provide rich, rewarding experiences, with tools for either side to...

It's a perfectly good idea. The system just needs to be designed to actually make doing that have three important characteristics: 1) Being fun to engage in that many combats; 2) Being reasonable (e.g. not tiring or tedious) to engage in that many combats at a regular pace; and 3) Not...

I'd like to introduce you to the (claimed) life story of one Quintus Horatius Flaccus, aka Horace, one of the great poets of ancient Rome. He came from a good family. His father was a freedman, a colonus, someone who had a farm that produced enough money to give the family a comfortable life...

While I can definitely see that having value, there's also the converse that if defense is truly super important...it functionally becomes a two-action game where one action is always reserved for defending yourself. That's sort of the issue with a lot of ideas like this, you have to be super...

Yeah. If you absolutely have to, you could even go for something like giving feats a score-boost prerequisite. "Some Feats have an associated ability score. For example, Resilient is associated with any single ability score, while Magic Initiate is associated with any one of the three mental...

If I might make an alternative suggestion for FoB? FoB: If one of your Moves was used for a Monk action, you can make 2 Unarmed Strikes as a single Move. (Becomes 3 at level 11.)

It has, yes. Had a TPK* because of one, for example, because the GM jumped us with a bandit attack while we were taking a short rest to recover from the absolute butt-whoopin' we'd gotten from the first combat of the day. *Well, all-but-one PK. But it killed the campaign nonetheless.

I've seen it. But not in 5e.

Happily for you, maybe. But this is much more useful.