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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...

I think you may have confused me with someone else. My stance has always been that it's preferable the rules be as complete as possible, making situations you can't reference them to resolve a course of action rare. If that does occur, the GM will ultimately have to adjudicate, extrapolating...

This is completely untrue. 5e's skill system looks nothing like 3e, setting aside the question of skill points entirely. 3e skill entries start with a complete description of what each skill allows, followed by a table of modifiers, followed by any modifying kinds of checks (climbing 1-handed...

It is very strange that 5e seemingly continues to be allergic to content expansions. I sort of understand that as a differentiating factor early on the in the line's release, but a decade on it's definitely starting to look shabby.

This is very helpful and concise, I just wanted to point out that Lin Codega uses they/them pronouns.

I put this down as historic evidence that generic systems define mundane classes. Fighters arguably did get magical powers, delivered through a specific carve out in a system that ever character could theoretically interact with.

Yeah, from a 10,000 mile design view, 4e was very clarifying about what the "mundane" aesthetic means in D&D to a chunk of players. You can't just take feedback like "it's not realistic" or "I just want to be an average guy who picked up a sword" or "they gave fighters spells" on their face, and...

For the initial goal of the license overall. If the logic runs "it's too expensive/unprofitable to support a huge variety of adventures/certain kinds of supplement, but the presence of those supplements is positive for the overall growth/profitability of the line" then the OGL creating the...