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Wanted to come back to this. 4e did not "strip them out for the most part". A lot of the things folks want are in there. They've just been rebuilt to fit into the paradigm of a combat system where "combat" means "set-piece" and attritional stuff is handled in other ways. It's sort of like how...

Key problem being, as folks around here are so keen to point out, high-level games are pretty rare. If you've just raised the level of a spell from 4th to (say) 6th, you've just made that a spell only reached in the last few weeks of most campaigns (going from char level 7 to char level 11)...

When you start our by saying that all the examples have to be excluded without having specified that there were any limits before, it makes responding rather difficult. I am, of course, specifically talking about the very thing you seem to think is a tiny exclusion, not large sections of the...

All that does is kick the fan down the road. Either you've just made those spells worthless because they fail so often they aren't worth deploying, or you've simply made it so lower level parties never get access to them at all, which is functionally the same as banning them entirely. As...

Ding ding ding ding. We have a winner, folks. And I can't even derive schadenfreude from it, because I have to endure this reality as much as anyone else does.

Then why do monsters do some things as attacks and other things as saves? Why this hybrid? If players like rolling, make them roll always. And if players want simple easy-to-learn systems, then do that. What's the point of this half-on, half-off, half-who-knows-where approach? I just...what...

Just wanted to specifically call out that this actually gets to the heart of the matter that Mearls, unfortunately, doesn't actually reach with his analysis. He stops short, and stays focused on band-aids, rather than trying to address the problem itself. You are quite right that this is a...

And switch to defenses which spells attack, rather than saving throws that targets must roll. Not only is it simpler and easier to teach, it makes creating support effects for others' abilities significantly easier, AND makes spell design easier to balance. We already have the notion of Death...

He's correct about the end result (Legendary Resistance is a cheap trick shoved in to deal with design faults), and the initial impetus which produced this (slavish adherence to tradition >>>>>>>>>>>>> anything else), but his reasoning for why that is the problem is flawed, which negatively...

Absolutely. New take on Sorcerers that makes them ACTUALLY completely distinct from Wizards? That gives the origin of their magic a central, leading role? NOPE, screw that noise, absolutely the hell not, give us the blandest possible crap instead. New take on Warlocks that puts their...

Yeah. Frankly, the fact that DDI + RPG sales were collectively over $7M when they hadn't published a single page of 4e content for over a year and had been ramping up the replacement for nearly two? That's goddamned impressive. But of course, trawling for any data that can be spindled, folded...

Okay. I can only go by the rulebooks I read. The ones that repeatedly say things of the form "You can do X. Or you can not do X. You decide!" Or the absolutely hilarious, legitimately "you can't make this stuff up" level of anti-advice, when the game literally tells you to figure out how much...

That's the issue though. It was never "leaving room for different people to evaluate things differently". It was often described that way, I freely admit. But it has always been "if the rules don't work as written, the GM will figure it out". That's one of the reasons I generally dislike the...

Given the loosey-goosey, "you're the GM, you figure it out" design of 5e, I doubt this will be even remotely an issue. 5e is never going to be a game where the rules just inherently work out of the box. That was, quite literally, one of the design intents, leaving a portion of the design for...

And? What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? For goodness' sake. Does this reply, in any way, address anything about the argument made?

I mean, the bigger reason to glance back and forth is that Pathfinder 1st edition is simply a copied version of D&D. You haven't "left the D&D fold". You've just jumped to a different creator making the exact same product under a slightly different name. It's not even like switching from Coke...

If it had been radically different from 5e, that would have been nothing but an improvement, so yeah, I'd have at least given it a shot with the hope that maybe it would stop actively crapping on my preferences as a gamer and player, with the hope that maybe this time the big tent would actually...

I've had two groups in my Arabian Nights-flavored Dungeon World game, Jewel of the Desert, that I've intentionally given blue-and-orange morality vibes. One, the Shi (arabicized of the Gaelic pronunciation of sidhe), view the world purely in terms of aesthetics. If something is beautiful, then...

This gets toward the "dark vs bright" and "grim vs noble" dichotomies folks talk about online. No idea if those have any relation whatsoever to proper criticism, but they're widely discussed online. Almost everyone has their own individual definition, but mine would be... Grim: Society is what...

I mean, there are plenty of dichotomies you can use, as long as you recognize that these things are always a spectrum, and there will always be works that simply don't have a spot on the scale because it doesn't apply to them. Consider Apollonian vs Dionysian, or "hard" vs "soft" sci-fi, or...