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In 5e? No, for most NPCs. You'll end up with an NPC who has a whole pile of mechanics you're never going to use, either because they won't last long enough in combat or because they won't get into combat. That's a waste of the DM's time and effort building them, running them, or both. Even for...

Speaking of semantic quibbles, "constrain" and "limit" are synonyms. It's a bit rich to pretend they're not for the sake of scoring rhetorical points in an online discussion.

I wouldn't - if the multiple damage types are a single source/instance of damage, then per the PHB rules that's a single concentration check.

Gonna chime in to agree that this kind of sidebar is useful and necessary. Ultimately, if I'm running or playing in a D&D game, it's a leisure time activity, not an exposure therapy session. It's not my responsibility to make myself or a player confront something one of us finds personally...

I daresay presupposing that 1st level D&D is "zero" is more of an issue than arguing that "zero to hero happens offscreen doesn't mean it doesn't happen". Even in the oldest versions of D&D, 1st-level magic-users could bend reality to their whims (even if it was only once per day!) and...

This seems rather close to claiming that the following activities don't count as playing a roleplaying game: Classic D&D play - that sort of "pawn stance" dungeoncrawl that emphasises player care and deliberation in play. Playing through an adventure path (which, after all, is almost entirely...

I mean, it might be very well and good for WotC to create content in its books that appeals to, say, a 5% niche of its player base if that niche is disproportionately buying those books, relative to the rest of the player base. At the same time, and keeping in mind that I have argued pretty...

It's fair to say the rules have to stop somewhere. The question is... where? For the designers of D&D, that's where its market position - and therefore its multiple player constituencies whose preferences are sometimes at odds with one another - becomes a "true issue" for the game. But on the...

The only thing in the PHB that I would like to see dropped is pound-weight for encumbrance. There's stuff I wouldn't miss, but that's what I'd like to see gone. For play at most tables, I suspect carrying stuff is hand-waved, and if there is any question about how much a character can carry...

I've pointed to examples of commercially-successful games that appeal to multiple player constituencies more robustly than D&D does (even just by the act of having a built-in "difficulty" slider!). If you don't think they have lessons D&D can learn from, as the saying goes, that's, like, just...

Apropos of D&D drilling down and focusing on the gameplay it's intended to deliver and therefore doing it well, I would certainly agree that D&D would be a better game if it focused on what I see as its twin cores of "casual heroic kill-and-loot gameplay" and "heroic character-driven adventure...

You are seemingly defining "playstyle" in a very narrow and incoherent way in order to assert an incompatibility that does not actually exist. By your own admission, D&D does support, and has traditionally supported "different playstyles", often more than of them in the same version of the game...

Excellent, then you'll be pleased to know others have stepped up to the plate. As for... So... Part of your initial enquiry was: To my mind, there is nothing in there that suggests the game had to fundamentally change its nature. So you'll have to excuse me for feeling a little grumpy...

I'm aware of only a tiny fraction of RPGs that exist, and I'm familiar with the rulesets of far fewer; as such I'm not personally aware of a non-D&D RPG whose design has deliberately set out to support multiple player constituencies. At the same time, the very fact of my unfamiliarity with the...

I'm prepared to assert that, to a certain extent, it is about a sense of exclusive ownership. Because of its share of the TTRPG player base, D&D has multiple player constituencies with gameplay preferences that are often at odds with each other. That's fine as far as it goes - as long as you...

To my mind, the salient feature that specifically distinguishes a tabletop RPG from other kinds of game is that it is (and I quote myself)... The symbols enclosed in parentheses were footnotes that expanded on the final sentence, which I do not believe are pertinent enough to include here. For...