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[Kamikaze Midget]

So, after the terrible Rust Monster Disaster of 2006 (Oh, the humanity!) they swore "never again." Too many 3E games were crashing and burning, endangering not only the players but hapless bystanders. How to prevent such tragedies due to human error? By designing the system to lock operators out of the loop at critical decision points.

It's weird to me that I'm usually halfway between the rock and the hard place on these conversations.

Ol' Rusty needed fixing. In a game that depends on items for balance, a monster that can blast apart your items also blasts apart the balance. The balance is there for a reason -- to keep the PC's having fun with their characters, so no one just wants to seppukku and the game remains something that's as much fun for the item-hound as for the DM.

You can't prevent human error, but you can certainly make a monster ability more limited in scope, so as to facilitate actually using the dang thing without boning the party.

I'm not necessarily a tremendous fan of how 4e does a lot of this adjusting, but I agree that it should have been done. My major issues with Heinsoo's positions are that he seems to believe the game he designed was the only game that could have been designed that would have met all his goals -- the way the 4e team chose was the only way that everyone could've had fun. That really isn't true. People had fun with the old school Rust Monster just fine. If you can figure out why that is, and design to THAT, you have a game that is fun.

I mean, I'm no savant, but any DM who cancels his game because the wizard didn't show up is a DM who was being a dink -- the bottleneck was too tight, or the DM valued the wizard to highly, or whatever. That's not evidence for the wizard being over-powerful, that's evidence for the DMing advice of "never just have one way out of a situation" being not prominently enough emblazoned in the guide, perhaps.