Moving on.... The rules forcing the DM to personally act as the bad guy to finish a rule or subsystem an endemic pattern through section after section of the rules & not limited to monsters or encounter related stuff.
The trouble there is it matters to a critical degree where & how the half baked gaps fall in a ruleset. I'll use one of what is possibly the most illustrative & glaring examples in 5e to demonstrate, encumbrance specifically.
I agree, but only in the sense that allowing "half-baked gaps" in the first place is a problem.
If you're going to have rules, the rules should be good and well-tested. That is what is actually empowering to DMs. It is not what "DM Empowerment" has been loudly-and-proudly proclaimed to be for the last decade-plus. The boosters of "Rulings not rules" and "DM Empowerment" (particularly those who have nothing but venom for so-called "player entitlement") have advocated for designers
not caring that there are major
If you're not going to have rules for something, then actually embrace that. Tell the DMs that. 4e did this. 13th Age did this. Dungeon World did this. Good, well-made games do this. 5e does not.
See above or pick a different subsystem like the yoyo death & dying clownshow the whole system is designed around. 2014 took steps to twist the system into a defensive thicket around the yoyo to ensure that a break there will require significant retooling of things. The new PHB adjusts one of the thorns in that thicket by giving players bigger heals that could theoretically support monsters that are tougher in more ways than just how many hp they have & better support tearing out the yoyo without it feeling like playing tag with a three phase power cable... but absent any indication to the contrary from wotc it could also be doubling down on the yoyo. The new DMG could have alternative death & dying rules that take a mallet to the yoyo... but once again we are back to the GM forcing a variant/optional rule that makes players feel nerfed & now when Bob suffers a reckless & completely avoidable PC death the blame is easy to shift exclusively to the fact that GM:Alice forced the group to use that yoyo-free variant.
Being perfectly honest, I don't understand what you're saying here--not on the detail level. I get that the overall point is that the design is both binary and sloppy, and this binary-and-sloppy pattern leads to problems. But given you have said that the details matter here, I'm pretty confident I'm just missing something because...I don't understand what phrases like "defensive thicket" and "the yoyo".
That said, from what I
can glean, I agree with your points here. WotC messed up by making in-combat healing so difficult (something done in part because it was how 4e did things). They messed up by making it so death is either difficult to inflict, or so easily inflicted that it is difficult or even impossible to distinguish "player made a foolish choice and suffered the consequences", "it was always a crapshoot and you never really had any way of changing that", and "GM played sillybuggers and now your character is dead."
It shames them like so: Well if only GM:Alice used the default yoyo rules Bob's PC wouldn't be dead & if only she accepted that encumbrance is unfun nobody would have needed to watch Bob look up & calculate everything he was carrying to find out that he was many hundreds of pounds beyond his capacity just so he could shrug & roll their eyes while throwing some HeavyStuff on someone like the wizard & rogue to completely ignore the problem while changing nothing of interest thanks to linear growth of strength to encumbrance capacity... Obviously Alice should have just used the default guidelines instead of making tougher monnters changing how death works & forcing us to watch bob calculate his encumbrance for the very first time.
This isn't the text of the rules though, so I don't see how it is the rulebook shaming the DM. Instead, the issue is that,
because the rules are binary and sloppily-made, the DM gets frustrated by using the default rules (because they don't really offer much challenge), but the players get frustrated because switching the binary midway through the game (IMO quite rightly) feels like "I am altering the deal...pray I do not alter it any further."
But, apart from that, I don't see how this is applicable because it is referring to 5e, when Micah was referring to Dungeon World. I still don't understand how DW is doing this, nor what portion of the text is doing it. DW plays with its cards face up. It makes very clear what the rules are for and why, and explains why changing them can have vast and sweeping negative effects on the game. If you don't like the rules, that simply means it's not the kind of game you should run, simple as. That's not "shaming" and calling it so is still something bizarre and confusing to me.
All of that is true as well,
@EzekielRaiden , although I was thinking about PbtA when I wrote about shame, there are definitely parts of WotC 5e that evoke similar things.
See above.
