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I'm on track to hit 200, but I'm likely to run out of books I want to read before I get there. It's a significant part of my entertainment/media diet; if a book makes it longer than a couple days, I must not like it very much, or I'm reading some other book simultaneously and this one has been...

Ah, I misunderstood the prompt. You're starting and sticking at 20th level. That makes more sense.

If that's the goal, I'd probably go further. Pick a level to fix the PCs at to get the base character level differentiation you want, then tie progression entirely to magic items/quest boons. Maybe pick a small range, and provide "training" as a potential reward that can get characters from say...

To be fair, I would be totally cool if we went the other way and shifted some hoary mechanics to match more modern fiction. Druids that shapeshift a lot more and cast a lot less spells would be fine.

That's such a solvable problem, and more an issue of feat design than anything else. Creating a simple set of feats by role for monsters/NPCs would have dealt with most of it. Plus we live in a modern age of digital tools. CR and magic item scaling are issues in their own right, but that's a...

Differing NPC and PC rules. The difference should be a matter of encounter adventure design, not mechanical interaction.

Careful. That's the first step on the dark path that leads to extrapolating setting norms from specific magical effects.

This is the primary strength of magic (or other unreal phlebotinum powered effects). It yields to definition into specific techniques in a way that's significantly more complicated for mundane effects. You can spell out the rules and requirements and they aren't beholden to any tests beyond...

I'd go one step further, and say "and PCs largely get encounters in a level appropriate order," but that's quibbling. There's also nothing wrong with making PCs a special case in the established universe of the game, as long as it's sufficiently explained. Exalted is the classic example of a...

This is a different issue, but also one encouraged by the lack of a firm goal of play; players should ideally know (or at least want to know) the rules of the game they're playing. My preferred approach goes a step further and maintains should not only know, but attempt to use, the rules of the...

I'm legitimately not joking when I say this should be the only option presented to players. Modern fantasy is even trending this direction, strict magical/non-magical skill separation is pretty rare in modern fantasy protagonists. Characters can still use swords, they should just also get...

Ah, see I can imagine nothing more disrespectful to a game (or more precisely, to the other players) than not trying to win it, and no worse design sin than asking me not to do that sometimes. The "integrity" of the game is a matter for the design and systems to solve, not for the players...

Yes, it is unethical to print the Fighter. In this talk I will...

That's sort of the problem though, isn't it? Without agreement on the fundamental purpose of the game, some set of player's attempts to improve it will necessarily make it worse for other people. Gritty rests are insufficient, but directionally correct. Long rests shouldn't be 1/week, they...

This whole discussion of background features feels predicated mostly on disagreement about the role of players at the table. Are they collectively telling a story as their first and foremost goal? If so, it's no particular imposition to ask everyone to work toward justifying/validating the...

Point of order, improvised action DCs (and very particularly skill challenges) are anathema to my preferred D&D, and I'm a direct product of an older D&D edition. I recently saw someone put forward a very useful summation of the position as "it is necessary for the rules to be laid out...

There's an assumption in here that leads to the absurdity, which is that any action declaration can be adjudicated by a roll. You can just lay out the time required to don armor and be done, you can write down what skills do and trust they will do those things.

That's an entirely different gameplay loop than having increasing high DC sets of abilities locked behind skills. @Bacon Bits correctly identifies below that it encourages players to roll for everything, and it requires the successful state be mutable; critical successes/failures have to create...

I don't know if you intended to imply this, but it's generally not okay to equate sexual orientation and transgender identity; they both fall under the broader queer umbrella, but are different things.

I think you're still missing the point broadly here, but that particular discussion was about half-orcs.