removing *ALL* mechanical advantages means that all characters are mechanically identical in all ways, and no actions (including roleplay choices) on the part of the PCs impact resolution of events, which is probably not what we want in RPGs
This doesn't seem right.
A few weeks ago I GMed a session of Cthulhu Dark. Each PC had two things written on their sheet: a name and an occupation. There was also a sanity die in front of each player (it starts at 1; 6 is bad news).
The basic mechanics are
build a pool and roll, taking the highest - if the action is within the scope of your occuption, you get a die for that; if it's something within human capabilities, yout get a die for that; and if you're willing to risk your sanity to succeed, you can include your sanity die.
The actions chosen by the players impacted the resolution of events. One player played a reporter, one a secretary in a law firm and one a longshoreman, but even had they all been playing longshoremen the actions that they chose would have impacted the resolution of events.
Options are nice, but they quickly become masterbatory. Content for the sake of content. More choices for the sake of choices, while existing content remains unplayed.
I don't agree with this. Look at our Cthulhu Dark game - a reporter, a secretary in a law firm, and a longshoreman. It could hae easily been a novelist, an accountant and a nurse. Or a diplomat, a playboy and a retired colonel (that's part of the party in my Classic Traveller game). Or anything else the players came up with when asked "What occupation do you want to be?"
In descriptor-based games like Cthulhu Dark or HeroWars/Quest or Maelstrom Storytelling you don't need "content" to make all these things possible, because people can come up with their own descriptors.
But D&D (and Classic Traveller, and most RPGs, especially the more trad ones) are not descriptor based. And so until the content is published, there will be ideas that players can come up with that are not realised in the fiction. In the case of a list-based game like D&D (and Classic Traveller uses lists for its PC-gen too), that means publish more stuff to put on the list.
(There's also the mechanical side of it, but you don't need to get to that to explain the long lists of published stuff - why did 2nd ed D&D produce so many "kits"?)
5e, very deliberately I would argue, unclogs the time and energy previous editions devoted to the character choice analysis paralysis in favor of allowing players to spend that time and energy making meaningful character choices from a more narrativist or story-based context.
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it's much easier to devote headspace to building a narrative around a character when one isn't also worried about so-called "trap" options or pouring over online guides for hours to find just that right feat.
This is where the 5e design, and the way it is sometimes described, leaves me puzzled. If I want to play a "narrative" or "story-based" game, with a character that expresses that,
why am I playing a game based around classes, level and feats?
If the answer is
because I want the fiction to impact the mechanics in distinctive and intricate ways then there is a clear logic that pushes towards something like the combat side of 4e PC build.
But otherwise the lgoic is something like the non-combat side of 4e PC build, which is pretty similar to something like Prince Valiant - choose a few key abilities from a short list of genre-appropriate descriptors, and have a robust resolution mechanic (skill challenges in the 4e case) for working out what happens when they're brought to bear.
(I also don't really get how "building narrative around a character" fits with the seemingly dominant role of APs in 5e play, but that's a different story.)
3e and 4e really, REALLY tried to universalize the gaming experience.
I can't comment on 3E, but that's so far from my 4e experience I find it hard to reconcile with it.
Do we fight mind flayers at 10th level or 20th level? The former if we're playing the Neverwinter supplement, which restatted a whole lot of paragon-tier creatures down to heroic-tier levels to facilitate a campaign experience that was shorter in mechanical and temporal duration but complete in story terms. The latter in my own campaign. (And I could say the same about giants, fey, etc - and I'm sure I'm not the only GM who noticed how easy restatting a 4e creature for a different level is.)
What's the DC to persuade the duke to talk to us? To seal the Abyss so it stops sucking elemental matter into its maw? To woo the heart of a princess? The 4e books don't even pretend to answer this, and leave nearly all the
fiction of non-combat resolution to be worked out at the table, guided by the description of what sort of stuff is default at each tier, and with a universal resolution structure modelled on scene-based resolution pioneered in mid-to-late 90s games like Maelstrom Storytelling.
Yes, 4e has overly detailed rules for cover (but not for hiding! - it's rules there seem far less hard to use than the 5e ones) - but if someone played 4years of 4e and had as their main take-away "Whoa, too much detail in the cover and concealment rules", then I feel sorry for their sucky RPG experience!
5e allows characters to do things without having explicit buttons for them. If you have never played an RPG like that before, then it is likely that you don't even see the possibilities.
This is a statement I would associate with 4e non-combat resolution, and also with some aspects of 4e combat (the p 42 driven ones).
For me, the difference with 5e non-combat resolution is that it has no framework to it that establishes finality of resolution, and so unless something is done at the table to compensate for this the upshot of non-combat action resolution is always ultimately a matter of GM decision-making. (Classic Traveller has the same problem in a few areas, especially on-world exploration. But I'm more forgiving of a game that was designed 40 years ago.)
