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A Cosmology that makes sense I am thankful for a Cosmology that I can introduce to new gamers without cringing. The Fey and The Shadow as well as the Elemental Chaos and the Astral Sea are evocative Places that invite exciting adventures. The Dawn War and the Shard of Evil actually give a...

Must spend some exp.... Agreed on both counts. 4e already gives monsters a life over at least 10 levels, which is a lot. It means that you can use the same type of foe over a whole tier. I'm not sure why it is useful to go much beyond that,e.g. why epic characters that converse directly with...

And PoE is showing here that just keeping AC down may not be enough to really broaden the utility of monsters over many levels. Instead it seems that HP and other abilities increase fast enough to make high level PCs still nearly invulnerable to low level monsters.

I think you are overstating the psychology aspect here, there is a good reason to treat these rules differently than earlier ideas that allowed maneuvers at a fixed penalty to the attack roll. CS dice are equivalent to a penalty to the damage roll. This is an important difference, as damage...

This is a key point If this is really all they are doing, then this new Combat Superiority is pointless. Mike's article suggests that The CS dice will actually be usable for a wider range of more interesting things, such as counterattacks and acrobatic maneuvers. Moreover, you may be able to...

These posts strike me as rationalizations against real compromise. I you say that everything important must be adapted the edition you like for something as nebulous as brand identity, it becomes impossible to identify real concessions you are willing to make.

For me , the variance of the d20 is much too high to conceptualize all failed skill rolls as mistakes by the PC. If a specialist attempts a task under a fixed set of conditions he will either succeed or fail, depending on the difficulty of the task, but either outcome is very deterministic. To...

Of course he could. Wall of force by itself wins fights by splitting the opposition into two manageable batches. Charm Monster takes out the big bad by itself, if he misses the save (~30% chance). Fireball and Web kill of swarms of small guys. So you still have an "I win" button for basically...

My perception is exactly the opposite: Many games had this problem, but didn't realize it. After all, within a gaming group a GM can do a lot of gyrations to make up for any problem in the gaming system. That such gyrations then may lead to less fun games and faster DM burnout is not easy to...

You misunderstand the skill system of 4ed. If the wall encountered by the PCs can easily be flown over, smashed of phased through, it is not a meaningful challenge for epic level PCs and thus should not require any kind of check. A wall that is a challenge for such characters may be the wall of...

What are you going to do with healing by inspiration? As long as we assume that loss of HP means physical injury and gain of HP is equivalent to the disappearance of that injury, nonmagical abilities that replenish combat in the middle of combat such as the Warlord's don't make sense. But...

Unfortunately, I think you are right. As Wotc is mainly interested in getting money from all the people that have some connection to D&D now, they need to follow closely to the majority opinion and avoid as many potential points of contention as possible. If Wotc wanted to design a version of...

You are overlooking that there is also a group of players that would have liked to keep full 4th healing rules in place that allow you to go into multiple combats a day with full HP. They are as unhappy by the HD/heal overnight rules as you are, but they want them to change in the opposite...

I called myself an amateur for the same reasons. But your classification makes more sense, otherwise there would be damn few professionals.

Most amateurs and professionals on EN-World are OGL-designers, so that they are happy with a new game that is similar to d20 is not that surprising. I would also be curious how you distinguish professionals and amateurs?

I think that depends on what you mean by common. I thought the argument was that short rests are not automatic, but that there is a reasonable number of circumstances where they are not available. To put this in numbers, short rests are not available after 5%-30% of all fights, and that...

Sorry for being unclear, I did not mean to suggest that most movies are just one single encounter. I just wanted to point out that in most action movies there are situations where a fight turns into a chase scene turns into another fight and so there is no time for a 5 minute break in between...

If you can you will always take it. But often you may not have the opportunity. Take the typical action movie out there and see how often the protagonist can take a 5 minute breather. For example, when my players infiltrate an enemy camp, they know that once they are discovered, they will...

I seems your problems mostly stem from a misunderstanding of the term "encounter". In almost all situations, the kobold caves are a single encounter. Unless the PC manage to take out the initial guards without any noise, alarm should be raised throughout the entire cave. Once the alarm is...

I agree. the fact that you can advance enough to make former opponents meaningless always distinguished D&D from other fantasy games. With the new flat magic, advancement in D&D will feel more like WFRP et al. and thus loose some of its distinctiveness.