It's a little sus that it's published by the same company that owns Traveller now. That said, I think $7 is not a lot of money for a book you're interested in. $60 for the physical is outrageous though.

So I guess that's actually several questions, and they each have different answers.

Why does combat feature heavily in D&D? It doesn't. Or at least, not necessarily. How much or little it features is dependent on your DM.

Ok, so why has it historically been featured heavily? Because of D&D's lineage. The game evolved mechanically from wargames, where combat was the whole thing, and thematically from works like Conan the Barbarian and Tolkein, where fighting monsters featured prominently.

Why so many types of monsters, then, if works like The Hobbit only had a half dozen or so? Because The Hobbit is a single story, whereas D&D is a framework for creating lots of stories. Maybe one short campaign or a campaign arc has as many monsters as a Tolkein story, but then you go on to the next arc, the next campaign, and you need something new. You can obviously recycle lots; orc bandits are different from orc soldiers are different from orc cultists. But with (tens of?) thousands of games going on continuously, year after year, there's always a demand for new content to slot in, and monster design is often a handy thing for DMs to outsource. Hence, there are a lot of kinds of monster because there is demand for them.

Are you asking why there are so many kinds of monsters, or why monsters appear so frequently in the campaigns you've played in?

That doesn't work for 40k, to my understanding. It's a miniatures combat game

Looking good! Those pirates have a pretty sweet setup!

That's kind of important to the story though.
::: spoiler spoiler V starts off thinking she's dying and her mind is changing and she doesn't know how long she's got, and by the end she's learned that everyone is dying and everyone is changing all the time and no one knows how long they've got. The only real choice is whether you use the time you've got to live, or don't. :::

Mhhh....I believe in the right tool for the right job. So there isn't really an ideal system, for instance, just the best system for what I'm trying to accomplish in a given game.

Sometimes that can be fun, but only if everyone at the table is onboard for a wild tangent. If the other players are bored as shit while the special snowflake starts a unicorn breeding operation, it's time to use that No. And you, the DM, are included in that too; if your players want to drag you off to write every book in the library and that's not fun for you, you have the right to say "hey maybe you should play the game I made for you instead."

You decide that if an when the players make it a priority with their choices.

Addendum to the "Are you sure you want to do that" bullet: if a player ever does something that seems nonsensical to you, ask them what they expect to achieve by doing that. Understanding their motivation is often what resolves the miscommunication and/or allows you to steer them towards a better way to do what they're trying to do.

Wow, just learned I've been missing the aoo rule for 20 years.

You could have the same spell OR the Counterspell spell. The benefit of taking Counterspell was that it could work against anything.

Spot on about the action economy observation though.

I read once that the earliest edition(s?) didn't have Rogue as a separate class, that everyone would be searching for traps and such. And when Rogue was added with the explicit ability to detect traps, it caused a crises because suddenly that implied that no one else had that ability.

It's the cats you gotta worry about.

There are a couple ways to get auto-generated transcripts from youtube (eg https://www.howtogeek.com/793947/how-to-get-the-transcript-of-a-youtube-video/ ), but there are enough errors and bad UI that I find reading them to be more miserable than just watching the video.

Main quest? Weird tangent? They're the same picture!

God you just described my prep in a nutshell. This is how they ended up fighting an orchestra

I like to fully improvise games in Digital Shades

Hi. I'm sorry, this looks like a legitimately great book, but we only allow self promotion from active users. I am removing your post, but if you are interested in becoming a member of our community, you would be welcome to post 1 self-promo per week in the future.

He even did the full chest bump thing. And then in case there was any doubt, he did the whole gesture again.