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It works for me - the statues could be quite worn and weathered yet their species still be obvious; and the days of "somewhat well-traveled" could have been a long time ago.

Designing to 20 looks pretty open-ended from the perspective of someone only playing to 12; even more so if some ongoing arithmetical progressions are given for level beyond 20 I'd be fine were they to admit they didn't try (or didn't try as hard) with the upper levels. In 1e Gygax doesn't...

How so?

If it's not on paper, it doesn't count. Paper first, then a digital version that's exactly the same. And page count is highly relevant even in digital form: lower page count means less chaff to plow through, less scrolling or page-jumping, and-or less wasted space.

If I write it out now then a) it's easier to run because I'm not making it up on the fly, b) I've got it if I ever want to run it again for a different group, and c) I've got it if anyone else ever wants to run it. One of these days the idea of "d) I can put it out there for public consumption"...

The DM running out of steam and-or duct tape is a symptom of the underlying loss of wheels, not the cause. For me, all it needs is a great big warning along the lines of "While the game as presented goes to 20 levels, the specific intent is that most if not all actual play will occur in the...

Perhaps fortunately, I'm not designing cars. :) The inherent problem with any open-ended and complex progression system is that there's always going to be phases where it works really well (i.e. as designed) and phases where it doesn't due to accumulated glitches. To give another car example...

Even when I'm the one who wrote the module I'm still reading it as I run it; it's not like I memorize the whole thing (if I could I wouldn't have written it all out in the first place!), and the players are inevitably going to do things I didn't account for and thus I have to read the words in...

How do you do that without presenting the same information twice, though? Duplication is wasted page space, and also runs the risk of errors creeping in where the info in, say, the long-form presentation contradicts the info in the short-form.

I'm not so sure about the bolded. A point-form timeline can be every bit as readable and far easier to understand (and, at the table, use) than the same history written out in long-form paragraphs. Example: if I'm running a game in Middle Earth and want to know the history, I'm going to look...

Sometimes it's there so that if the PCs make inquiries the DM has something to fall back on and isn't left trying to make something up on the fly. But if the PCs don't ask, they don't and won't learn that info. So be it; some players aren't interested in that. Other times it's there to give...

Part of the problem is the decreased acceptance of the idea that some species are simply flat-out better at, or better suited for, some classes than they are for others. In 1e, Hobbits make great Thieves or Assassins but lousy melee Fighters. Dwarves make great melee Fighters but can't do...

That's very much how I see it. Or the government is largely made up of retired high-level adventurers who have kept their skills current. Slots in well with the 1e idea that name-level characters retire and become lords or ladies - i.e. minor nobility, even if self-styled - overseeing a...

Why not? In a might-makes-right society, which many D&D settings strongly tend toward, being or becoming the biggest baddest band o' murderhoboes in the land would seem to be a highly viable career goal. That, and for my part I see D&D settings as being every bit as violent as the historical...

Change "Intelligence" to "Wisdom" in the quoted post and you've nailed my playstyle bang on. :)

Tradition and nostalgia would lead to both - you'd have bad saves at low level progressing to good saves at high level.

That's not luck, that's actual good design: you get the bits right that most of the people are going to use most of the time, then let the other bits (that people don't use nearly as often) fend for themselves. 1e and 3e did much the same thing. They got low-mid level right - which is where the...

Easy enough to tweak any spell that targets either Intelligence or Wisdom to instead target both, with the victim having to use the worse of the two saves...

And much of the point of playing D&D is that I can be and-or do things I can't in real life.

Particularly for lower-level play, you're pretty close to the mark overall here. Our games tend to be fairly lethal at low levels to begin with - kind of like a very slow-motion DCC funnel - even before any CvC stuff might rear its head, and so players tend not to get attached to their...