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Ranger's core concept is wilderness expert. That does not necessarily need spells, it is just that spells tend to be the easiest way to handle more detailed non-combat rules in D&D. But the wilderness expert archetype being a spellcaster is a bit of an anomaly. It is not strongly associated...

But of course if everything is railroading there is nothing to manage, as you literally cannot avoid it! This is not what agency in a game means. I want to win in chess. But because I'm bad at it, I lose. But I did have agency. Now if I would just declare that I win in chess, I really would...

And those are things that by your logic are always railroading. Ergo, GMing is railroading. It is cooperative activity. All the participants influence the content and course of the game. That the GM or other players influence these things too does not mean your agency has been violated. It...

And that is just execution of mechanics that could be automated (and in many virtual tabletops are.) This is not really what GMing is about. But the GM choosing the enemies and their stats before the game also biases the outcome. So by your logic, still railroading. Right. So anything that...

Sure. But only because you do not apply your own logic coherently. It lead so that. And in a game like D&D, the GM makes judgement and decisions that affect the content of the game and how the players perceive said content all the time. Like literally apart purely mechanical things that...

It has been addressed. "GM force" is more than the GM just exercising judgement and doing normal GM duties. No one is denying that what the GM does affects the course of the game. Of course it does, like contributions of all participants do. This is not GM force or railroading. You have made...

Better, except the slashing one, which seems to be trading ten points of damage for about then points of damage, which seems rather pointless.

What @Celebrim is doing is something like this: "What it really means "to punch" someone? It is to apply force with one's hand to someone else's body. But people do this all the time! Every time we touch someone, we apply some amount of force to their body, however minuscule. So I may have...

I like the idea of mastery or some such tied to damage type, but what you suggest is exactly the sort of thing that makes me prefer streamlining. It is fiddly low impact thing that does not simulate anything and does not make actions more interesting. It also creates weird incentives like...

I don't particularly want it to matter. I'd be fine with this being streamlined.

I gave that to swords in my houseruled weapons document. It is meaningless though, as it is extremely rare that anything in the game cares about differences between weapon damage types, and S/P/B should just be streamlined to "physical damage."

Probably because they are very different. Latter is larger, much heavier, can be used with both hands.

GM is constantly making judgement on all sort of things. What to describe, what details to emphasise, what statblocks to use for enemies, what are the DCs for tasks etc. etc. There is very little of what GM does that do not include some amount of this. And then the same logic applies to all of...

But player introduced goals also often depend on getting to certain destinations. So how it can be railroading to time skip in order to make this possible? Here the railroading is done by inconsistent handling of time depending on what the GM wants to encourage or discourage. It is not time...

I don't think all railroading is bad, and subtle railroading might even be beneficial. It really is a matter of taste. If the players are happy, then you're doing fine.

No, this is just a complete non sequitur. If players choose that their characters go to a certain destination, then skipping some of the travel time so that they can actually get there in reasonable amount of game time is not any sort of railroading. Hell, insisting that you play all of the two...

Sure, but then again, if these things are supposed to be killable by human scale weapons, they probably should not be absurdly large.

Yeah, same. But in some art the dragons are depicted as way bigger than that.

I do not think people expect hard realism from D&D. But I think it is reasonable to expect that you can at least visualise how the things rules say happen, can happen. And I have to admit that with killing a gargantuan creature with a weapon such as a dagger I have hard time visualising how it...

The issue is that D&D does not really have the mechanical depth to actually represent the nuanced differences between various weapons. So if you have a lot of weapons what happens is that some are just better than others and then you're "forced" to use those. And the result is that by expanding...