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If you're writing a rules section.... ...which specifically purports to tell the GM how to award XP for non-combat encounters when they wish to do so... ...then the entirety of this argument is completely irrelevant. The section is already assuming that you are using XP levelling, not...

And yet, here we are! Folks in this thread have already specifically cited examples of such length. Examples which, as I recall, fundamentally changed how they understand game design, because they'd actually experienced how much it sucks to go through that. I've certainly not experienced...

I mean, sure, but let's dig up that specific quote I referenced earlier, which (supposedly) I have an unfair interpretation of. The quote is as follows, from the 2014 DMG. This is the complete entirety of its guidance for how to give XP for non-combat encounters. Noncombat Challenges You...

The former is the designers saying "we don't have to actually design a functional game. We just need to print something on the page. GMs will figure it out." The latter is, "We took very seriously that the game needs to actually be well-designed from the beginning, even though we know you will...

And I say a game which is designed to make this happen even a tenth of the time is a badly-designed game. Like it is literally, objectively bad at being a thing you play. Because you literally don't play it a large portion of the time. You just sit there, completely disengaged, until you're...

There is a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge difference between throwing GMs to the wolves because you know every GM will make small tweaks here and there to the game, and making a game that is designed to work exactly as advertised, while recognizing that GMs will likely make small changes here and...

Plus, let us point out the rhetorical trickery employed here. (Note that I am arguing to the thread at large; I know you don't need to hear this.) "Tough. Not evryone [sic] is going to be involved every moment, fact of life." What does that actually mean? "You won't be involved in every...

The main problem with the proposed Savant feature is not that it is thematic, it's that it will push players even more to focus on the very best spell schools. Divination would be pretty thoroughly nerfed, I'll give you that, but the three you mention would be an enormous buff. You'll get a...

Sounds like the condition track, no? If so, perhaps we could even make it have either 3 or 5 steps as desired for any particular effect, like so: Hold Person (concentration; see text) -2: Paralyzed for one minute, concentration no longer required -1: Stunned and Restrained 0: Dazed (can only...

That's....not a selling point.

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...