It’s definitely weird, and at least anecdotally it feels like we stop accepting the abstractions of people flinging spells and swords around in a fantasy world once we start asking questions like, “Well why can’t I just headbutt the orc and knock it out?” or “Just grab him and pin him so he can’t perform any actions!”

As far as it pertains to stealth, the people I’ve been playing with for the last decade or so are spoiled by MMORPG stealth where you can do silly stuff because you disappear from the world while hidden.

Plus, everyone wants to get the drop on the monsters, so any time they are spotted it leads to frustration and people thinking you fudged the dice in the monsters’ favor. The very idea of losing your stealth because you broke cover from the thing you are hiding from is a source of endless contention and rules minutia abuse in my experience.

I guess in hindsight it was a bad idea to make certain mechanics so reliant on surprise and being hidden. I’m looking at you, rogue assassin archetype. You make my groups do silly initiative staggering nonsense and I dislike you for it!

I’m not disputing the notion that it’s harder to make a system simple than it is to make it complex… I’m just baffled why these two specific areas are so often the “rough patch” in so many “smooth” game systems.

Dozens of games, hundreds of designers, and myriad genres… and it’s always mounted combat and wrestling that is the weird problematic subsystem.

Because simplicity is hard work, and a rule can be so minimalist as to be unsatisfying with the options or variety of outcomes that it provides.

I’ve never understood why grappling and mounted combat are always such black holes of otherwise good game design. It’s like designers seem to craft these beautiful Yves Klein-esque minimalist systems… and then go temporarily insane and create a Rube Goldberg-esque complexity subsystems for mounts and wrestling.

It’s weird, man.

5e has got them mostly sorted, but I still feel they could have made them even more minimalist.

Nothing, God be praised, is as miserable to deal with as 3.x grappling with relevant feats piled on; the only exception to that statement is the far far worse 1e pummeling and grappling rules. It’s still too soon, man, I can’t go back there, I have SEEN some shit.

Stealth is the new Grappling.

Yeah, stealth is always a pickle. I have been super lucky with my 5e players being chill about it. The exchange is the get hung up on realism quite a bit.

I am sure you have seen it, but Crawford tweeted a bit about stealth the other day:
https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/960227137859895296

Literally the plot of a 2016 film by Nacho Vigalondo.

That would make one hell of a carousing table result, now that I think of it.

As with any time that I change the rules or introduce something new, you can change things about your character or talk to me about issues you may have with the rules change.