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"Life isn't fair." gets from me the response "Deal with it." There's always going to be times when not everyone is involved at once: --- a character gets taken out early in a combat (held, webbed, slept, killed, petrified, polymorphed into a toad, whatever) --- the party splits, intentionally...

Dungeons: constantly. Dragons: not so much. Around here, sometimes the biggest obstacle to play is food/snack preparation and consumption, leading to the alternate game name "Feasts and Foodies".

Given my druthers I'd get rid of spell concentration as a game mechanic entirely (other than for a very few spells, all of them non-passive illusions) and go back to spells having fixed durations. I'm of the mindset that if I can hit you with something like a Hold Person and get through your...

Not at all. Sure the lower-level parties might never get access to them, but their higher-level opponents do... :) Spells: they're not just for PCs any more.

I wouldn't! I and the party would hail it as an easier-than-expected victory, maybe even an upset against the odds, cheer, and happily move on. And sometimes, the big boss is going to totally nerf you.

So if they can't do damage and they can't cast save-or-suck (which includes anti-buffs), what's left? Buffing allies? Boring boring boring. Divinations? Should be doing that before combat, not during. Summoning? Yeah, let's make this long combat take longer by adding more idiots to the mix...

All this does in principle is nerf lockdown spells even more, to the point of what's the point? Sorry, but lockdown is and should be just that: lockdown. You're out of action, completely vulnerable, and dead unless your allies can carry the day.

That was often my strategy as well, with a healthy dose of milling so I could run the opponent out of cards. Didn't work very often, but man was it ever satisfying when it did! (yes, I was nasty to play against 'cause I loved drawing out the opponent's agony if s/he didn't just concede) But...

I'm fine with spells that break the combat system and do things other than straight h.p. damage, even if-when those spells become I-win buttons. Even as a player who likes playing blast-mages, straight h.p. damage is boring; 1e redeems this by having the targets' items have to save if the...

And in case someone hasn't already mentioned this, those things are themselves largely recycled from 1e (stronghold rules) and 2e (most of the Birthright setting). Still nice to see WotC bringing this element back into the game, though.

Take cars. They achieved their basic form and function by around 1920 if not sooner, and from then until about 2005 all we saw were incremental innovations and tweaks which in aggregate a) made a 2005 car immensely different than a 1920 car and b) still recognizable as a car both externally and...

Or (numbers made up as I can't be arsed to haul out the MM right now): "Dire apes (3), HD 5, att. 2 (fist-fist), dmg. 2d6-2d6, SA rend for 3d8 if both fists hit same target in same round, SD fearless, SQ strength 18, HP 35 each" There. Two lines of text and now I don't have to reference the...

Be careful with the "us" and "we" here - I too would love to see a new D&D edition, but I suspect the new version I'd like to see would be light-years different from the new version you'd like to see.

I don't think the delve format was rejected as being non-innovative. Instead, it was rejected because it failed in achieving its goal of making modules easier to run. Nor IME can 95+% of any other module cartographers out there. I feel your pain on this one. I can live without ceiling...

Adventures are the lyrics. The rules are the instruments. APs are just longer lyrics. The people at the table are the band, with the DM as either the drummer (setting the tempo and letting the players call the tune) or the lead vocalist (in a more railroad-y type of game). Advice videos are...

Yes, and that creation of something new can simply involve synthesizing existing elements in a way not done previously. In both cases, I disagree. Taking RMs skill system and synthesizing it with what D&D already had is IMO innovative, in that the end result is something not seen before. The...

Indeed. Where things go adrift is when people start automatically assuming "innovation" and "improvement" are one and the same. Each edition has done some things better and some things worse than the edition(s) prior, where the value of "some" varies both by objective measures and the viewer's...

Sometimes things get to the point where further innovation beyond very minor refinements isn't going to make it any better, and the best course is steady as she goes. Put another way, if it ain't broke why even bother trying to fix it. And I say that as someone not a fan of current WotC design.

And posting on a forum like this is... ??? (I'm assuming you're using "groggy" in a denigratory sort of way here, as that's how it reads)

Which is fine, but - like it or not - the player-base of all those games in aggregate is a rounding error in comparison to that of D&D itself. They're a non-factor. One thing I think WotC might have got right here is that because it's a relatively small shift from 5e to 5.5e the adoption will...