Hot take / rant warning

What is it with this prevailing sentiment about avoiding math in your game designs? Are we all talking about the same math? Ya know, basic elementary school-level addition and subtraction? No one is being asked to expand a Taylor series as far as I can tell.

And then there's the negative sentiment about stuns (and really anything that prevents a player from doing something on their turn). Hell, there are systems now that let characters keep taking actions with 0 HP because it's "epic and heroic" or something. Of course, that logic only applies to the PCs and everything else just dies at 0 HP. Some people even want to abolish missing attacks so everyone always hits their target.

I think all of these things are symptoms of the same illness; a kind of addiction where you need to be constantly drip-fed dopamine or else you'll instantly goldfish out and start scrolling on your phones. Anything that prevents you from getting that next hit, any math that slows you down, turns you get skipped, or attacks you miss, is a problem.

More importantly, I think it makes for terrible game design. You may as well just use a coin and draw a smiley face on the good side so it's easier to remember. Oh, but we don't want players to feel bad when they don't get a smiley, so we'll also draw a second smaller smiley face on the reverse, and nothing bad will ever happen to the players.