Recent content by Jeremy Ackerman-Yost

Sure. But those rules are more of the type "Breaking a mirror gives you 7 years bad luck" than "Blood is red because it has iron-based pigments." At the end of the day, they why supernatural rules eventually default to someone shrugging and saying "That's just the way it is" and with no...

Haven't played with them much, but I do really like the Thief's gimmick and the Mage is just straight up great. I'll have to play the Thief more to make a real judgment, but it was certainly fun at the table in my brief exposure. I'll probably try a hunter at some point, too, though I still...

Perhaps it's my mistake, but you came off as rather condescending in the previous post, and not a little bit dismissive of many facts about 4e. If I misread that, I apologize, but you haven't done anything to make that reading harder to justify since. I'm sorry, but this is a ridiculous...

Sure. As I said, I make an effort to use my best skills, and if that is a no go, I at least try to contribute secondary skills or aid another. There are plenty of ways to be useful in many cases. My point, however, was specific to the concept of lethal challenges. When the skill challenge is...

Oh, I'm not saying you can't do it. But you have to be aware that if you're calling for hard checks, certain classes are going to have a LOT of options at their disposal while other classes might have 1, maybe 2 skills worth rolling. I spend a lot of time justifying why Perception and...

This. I'm playing a Fighter in a skill heavy campaign. I've multiclassed and used a background to get more skills, and I've taken feats that give skill bonuses, and I still suck at almost everything. I can manage Athletics, Endurance, and Perception. If you need something else from me, I...

You and I? More or less, yeah :) But what I object to is this: This isn't entirely coherent. If you fight a crowd of farmers, for example, they might be a single entity in combat: "Swarm of Farmers." Or they might be 6 minions, two brutes, and a leader. They could be just a pile of...

Sure, but the post above that one contains multiple minion-centric paragraphs, which is what I was really responding to. As Dice4Hire just said, that's how the game is built. If you consider head-shotting low level characters a feature, you simply aren't going to like 4e as much as other...

Talking about the relative power levels of PCs vs. minions is something of a fallacy. I hate to use this word, because it's one of those words that cause arguments, but it's applying a kind of simulationist thinking that doesn't fit. Minions are more of a narrative device than anything. They...

The most important consumer is still the guy who prefers books. So the transition still hasn't really happened. But we're getting to a point where people play WoW before ever being introduced to D&D. And now Bioware is actually making an MMO, for god's sake. Story is moving into that space...

Oh sure. That's very true, and I think the ideal organization would include all divine classes, and probably monks to boot since they're vaguely Psionic at most and you could just as easily call them Divine or Martial. Heck, you could manage Arcane or Primal without much worry, too. But...

This is where I firmly disagree with you. It's a brave new world. The line between different types of games keeps getting fuzzier, and D&D has an online presence. At some point pretty soon, the consumer is going to expect the rough edges to get polished. It's what other games do. And the...

I'm not sure why so many are focused on non-cleric classes for this concept. There's anything forcing commando analogs to be Avengers or Paladins. After all, the parallels between the generic D&D party and a tactical squad of soldiers are pretty strong. The cleric fits fine. Compared to the...

I have found the monk to be very, very fun, but it's not the "best striker." I built mine as a very controller-y striker, and I'd call the class a good hybrid, but not purely good at one role.

A quibble: It IS simplification. It decreases the number of choices necessary to achieve your stated goal. That's not "bad." It's not a sin. Simplicity is not inherently a bad thing. Often it is a virtue. And as you say, it gives you exactly what is on the label. There's also significant...