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I suspect the mule was omitted from 4e for balance as much as anything else. In a 3e game of mine, players were able to loot a hundred useless +1 swords from a battlefield for a sale price of 100,000gp - all for an investment of a few hundred pack animals! Now that 4e lets wizards cast Magic...

I'm particularly interested in seeing: 1. A party of four or five against various encounters (real D&D isn't fought solo, 4E's fighter is a damage-taker and not a damage-dealer, fighters are expected to have the support of a cleric, and so on) 2. Analysis of the duration of combat as one...

I made a similar analysis in May, and came to a similar conclusion. From January to May 2009 there were 58 articles by 24 authors. Of those, 21 were staff or established freelance writers. 15 of those are credited in the 4E Player's Handbook, 2 were the respective creators of Eberron and...

Between magic item crafting and the fabricate spell, D&D's had something similar for a while now. It's interesting though to consider the effect on society. I think there's still going to be room for common crafters and artisans. A wizard can make a tower in a day for 100,000 gold pieces, but...

It's the Tieflings I don't like. I loved them in third edition, but the new art style makes them look ugly and monstrous. One of the pictures shows a tiefling fighting a half-orc, and I've no idea which one is supposed to be "the good guy".

Software projects are said to arrive frequently late, over budget and under specification.

I think it's said that a dragon considers its territory to be everything within a day's flight, but I'm not sure whether or not that's a return flight. For one day's flight that's 160 miles for most non-ancient dragons. That's 80,424 square miles or 20,106 square miles if you assume that's...

Mearls is the man who knows D&D third edition better than anyone I can think of. He played D&D under one of the authors of third edition, published a book deconstructing the rules (Iron Might), then published his own version of the game (Iron Heroes). He was hired by Wizards of the Coast after...

I generally leave coup-de-grace to after the fight, and even then only if all PCs have dropped or fled. Monsters generally focus on more immediate threats before finishing off defeated enemies.

Bear in mind that since players are still new to the rules, the game may be more lethal right now.

That's true, but it's also a matter of the value of gold. Items sell for half and shops have a limited range on sale. After the early levels there's nothing worth buying, which means there's no point in collecting "vendor trash".

Fighters are meant to have that +2 or +3 bonus because they no longer gain higher Base Attack.

Blacklight, third level Darkness domain. Creates an area of darkness which the caster can see through. Generally, however, if you can see the target and aren't flanked you won't be sneak attacked.

A masterwork sword is 315gp worth of treasure. If you can't use that, resale price is a consolation prize. It's Dungeons & Dragons, not Shopping & Sales. In earlier editions, treasure wasn't for selling. Items didn't have buy or sell prices, and if you found something you couldn't use, it had...

Third edition already has a monster advancement system, as detailed in the Monster Manual. Some advance per hit dice and gain relevant bonuses, others advance by level. I think a CR+2 creature might equate to an Elite, CR+4 to a solo.

They're not underused if I like to employ them. My standard answer is "Oh, any level-draining undead, really."

Craft was a terrible skill. You spent valuable skill points to take a discount on a limited subset of mundane equipment. It's easier to make that part of your character's background detail.

So far, my main concern is that you can't cast stuff like silent image in combat any more. Sure, illusions and such are hard to adjudicate, meaning that the effectiveness is very hard to judge objectively, but you lose some flexibility. I can see it pretty easy to create new Wizard spells of...

This is why professional server admins charge even more than programmers. A programmer must make a computer do what he wants. This is difficult. A system administrator must make sure the computer never fails. This is impossible.

It's reasonably easy to add disarm back into the game as a combat option, but the question is, do you want to? Say you fight a villain who's deadly with a sword. An attack will deal him damage, but a sunder or disarm will be just as easy to manage and renders him nearly powerless for the rest...