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I don't know if you've tried looking at 2e with fresh eyes, but there's a lot of faff to it. For example with things you don't have to worry about like weapon proficiencies, and especially the 50+ Non Weapon Proficiencies. And there are a lot of numbers attached to each stat.

This is more about D&D being behind the times than a modern game and 5e is the easiest D&D edition to make a character for. (Having recently tried I'd argue that 5e is probably easier than 2e as well). But one of the things I wanted to do when I wrote my 4e retroclone was make character creation...

Not even close. I can not think of one legend (although there probably is one) where he broke out the healing magic or turned undead. Friar Tuck's job or background is friar but his D&D class is either fighter or rogue. D&D is its own genre with its own genre tropes and traits, and D&D clerics...

If one player is a problem it's probably that player. If the majority of players or the group is the problem then the DM should look in a mirror to find the weak link.

So what you are saying is that there was a sliver of time in between the brown box of 1974 and the PHB of 1978 where the presence of a commonly used unbalanced splatbook had raised the lethality beyond what was intended before hit points were raised to compensate. So they could deal with the...

Agreed for the game but not the players. When playing with more invested players I expect the setting to be on fire within six months at the outside and the characters to have been through narrative arcs. And we'll be starting the next game with the same players.

And this is one of the reasons I consider Simulationist/exploration game design to basically never lead to great results. If instead of wasting my time with a pre-constructed setting I'd brought the PCs in to the shared setting building and asked them to name how they were being oppressed they'd...

And in case you have forgotten all weapons in oD&D did 1d6 damage. So they may have had 7hp but your average second level cleric couldn't be brought down by an orc in one hit back then either. Neither could your average third level magic user. And hit points of characters that survived level 1...

Not even Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. In AD&D 1e an orc did 1d8 damage, which is a reasonable benchmark. Your average second level cleric had 2d8=9hp so they could not die to one blow. Just to compare to a 5e orc; a 5e orc does d12+3 damage for a maximum of 15; our level 2 cleric needs a Con of...

If you rolled low, sure. But if you rolled high the opposite was true. And proportionally the rate was faster because you didn't maximise your first hit die. I would point out here that if two 5e characters from many classes are mechanically identical at level 3 and don't multiclass there is...

Again I'd rather not use that as a game design description; contemporary classical music started in 1945.

All else being equal I'd agree with you - but there's something to be said for rough edges in places; I wouldn't want e.g. Call of Cthulhu to have a smooth combat system for street brawling for example. Instead it should feel messy.

Levels in the abstract are a bookkeeping convenience. Levels as used in D&D where your average person is either level 0 or level 1 and where there is absurd growth in things including toughness. And likewise the D&D class system is a lot more of a straightjacket than a class system needs to be...

To an extent. But applying pressure isn't the GM forcing the choice in what they do about it.

I always find that the key things to get proactive players are empowered players and pressured characters. Empowered players helped write some of this stuff but only some and it makes it personal when I build on what they give me. Pressured characters have a reason to not just sit around...

I think they are expensive. I consider complexity to be a cost (and extra subsystems to be a form of complexity) - and different people have different budgets. Are they worth it? It depends on what the game is trying to do, why they are there, and how well they are written. Are journey rules...

My objection to the term "Modern" is that the modern period in art ended in about the 1970s and modern architecture similarly. Modernism in music is the first half of the 20th Century. There will come a day when whatever we call modern ... isn't. So I'd always rather use something more descriptive.

A lot here depends on the exact game and the way it's run. I mean I've seen it work with the right Apocalypse World playbooks (a Gunlugger mostly there to hang out and for occasional smashing things is not a problem in any direction and it's kinda what the Battlebabe does). Monster of the Week -...

To me there's a big hidden factor here. Sometimes social gamers are a category, sometimes they are people who are not as engaged by the game as they might otherwise be but it's better than nothing. And sometimes you can find the right game or playstyle for them and unlock them. But genuine...

I'm going to use an analogy. The Star Wars OT did things the way it did because it was innovative and groundbreaking and they were working things out as they went, trying their hardest to make a new thing. Many of the choices were good, some were bad, and most were innovative. The Star Wars...