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On the upside, when I see bad posting, that lets me know to avoid future posts!

But that's the same thing. Exploring "not X" is also just a way to understand X. A story about immortality is really a story about understanding mortality.

The point I want to make is that there is a gap between "inclusion" and "exclusion". Like, triton is an ancestry in Mordenkainen's. I have never once used or seen that race in any game I run. I have no idea where they would crop up in any game I'm running. I don't have them "included" in my...

I'm all for curation. I'm simply opposed to curation that's happening strictly within the DM's purview and not in a discussion with the players. If you're the GM and you don't like dragonborn, you don't have to include them at all unless one of your players wants to be one. I've been...

Presentation is key to how a game is understood and appreciated. The narrative consumers build around a rule set is more important than the actual contents of the rules themselves.

7. All things being equal, I like a little more build complexity rather than less. My ideal would be something similar to 4e, just with less overall feats and a few less on-map conditionals.

I do, however, identify with Actual Cannibal Shia LaBoeuf.

Yes, that's literally what I meant. But those differences have to be qualitative, not just numerical. A system with tiers should always be presenting as moving characters into the next tier as an "opt-in", so that framing the game into a new power structure is a deliberate choice. The...

You can have a level-based system and a tier system together. 5e has what I would call a real "tier system" (not the Tier 1-4 nomenclature commonly used in 5e discussion). The real tiers are the "1-20" tier, and then 21+ tier. Level 20 is what an actual endgame for a tier system should look...

Yea, I would generally view it as: Street-level (a group of Stormtroopers is to be avoided, planned around, or ambushed) Jedi Padawan/Competent Soldier level (a group of Stormtroopers is a threat to be dealt with) Jedi Knight level (a group of Stormtroopers is an environmental hazard blocking...

Sure. I just want the system to set the expectation that "this is the end of the road for power gains", not that "you could have gotten even stronger, but you just didn't." It's like in D&D, I want gods to be something that transcends normal power progression. Gods aren't just level 40...

Right. Having a non-human perspective is certainly possible, but its utility is in telling a story that reflects somehow on our shared human condition. You can tell a story about elvish immortality, but that story exists to hold up a mirror to our own human desire to understand death, memory...

I don't feel it is. I'd rather do a Blades-like system than a system with the progression chopped down.

I agree here. To me, the salient point is that different ancestries in our fantasy game aren't supposed to be explorations of science and taxonomy; they're supposed to avenues for storytelling. And the amount of stories we can tell about creatures that share none of our (humanity's) emotional...

To me, that's a perfect example of why you need different games. If I'm running a gritty street-level game like Andor, and we meet a Sith Lord or a Jedi Master, I don't want the system telling the players "Don't worry, in a couple levels you'll be able to go toe-to-toe with this guy." That...

I've been an advocate for this for a while. If you follow bog-standard 5e XP granting practices, you'll usually level up after about 2-3 long rests worth of encounters anyway. Most long rest oriented classes still have plenty of short rest and at will resources. The only real change I do is...

To be fair, that sounds like something like a venture capitalist harvesting “youthful blood” transfusions from transients would say. :)

Here's the core challenge of the rest model. The game, as designed, is based on challenging the party through resource attrition. If you waste resources on encounters 1-3, then encounters 4+ become riskier and more likely to lead to a loss. This incentivizes the players to rest often to...

Harder, certainly. But Pendragon did it back in the mid 80s, so certainly not impossible.

I didn't think of Cosmere, but that would also be an excellent fit. Variations on the common tropes as classes, and use talent trees to fit to the specific concept.