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The SRD rules on line of effect are as follows: So unless noted otherwise, you must have line of effect to an area to affect it with an effect and line of effect is blocked by solid barriers, and even if you consider it a spread it can only go around corners, not through walls. The default...

They've said in a few places that "every core class in the PHB" doesn't necessarily mean there will be one class called Rogue, one called Assassin, one called Sorcerer, etc., but that some of the lighter-weight classes might be specialties and some of the broader classes will have several...

First off, the arcane/divine split doesn't prevent you from having spells open to everyone, because most effects are not arcane- or divine-only; as I mentioned, there are several things that arcane and divine casters have traditionally had in common but have excelled at in different ways. You...

Just to clarify, if you're referring to my mention of druid being a subclass of cleric in my last post, that was because in AD&D it was a cleric subclass, and both the cleric and druid shared the features I was talking about. I'm not saying 5e should have the classic four and then make the...

Paladins have traditionally gotten their powers from Good rather than serving a god--paladins of a god were only a thing in Forgotten Realms and then became standard in 4e--and clerics traditionally gained their lower-level (1st-3rd) spells via faith alone. So yes, the paladin is still divine...

Here's my take on the arcane/divine distinction, spoilered for length: Flavor-wise, the difference between divine and arcane is that divine magic is done at the whims of some higher being or power, where arcane magic is merely the manipulation of energy. A cleric or paladin has to obey his or...

I ran a short adventure like that, where not only did the PCs use 3d6 in order but they also randomly generated their class and race. Each character had two backup characters as well, generated the same way, and they could be found in the course of the adventure (a captive of the villain...

I'm back; hope you all had a good Thanksgiving or good regular weekend, depending on where you are. Relativity is the "how" for gravity; we can describe it mathematically, predict its activity, and so forth. We don't know why gravity is attractive rather than repulsive, why spacetime has the...

As I said before, I'm not claiming that D&D's way is the One True Way of gaming, and other games play much differently than D&D does. The way Maelstrom RPG plays has no impact on how D&D plays; Maelstrom has a passage telling you that distances don't really matter compared to the emotional...

You had said that luck and divine favor were what let PCs survive long falls, with the implication that treating HP as mostly physical wouldn't allow that to happen; I thought you were objecting to the actual survival as opposed to a PC's expectation of survival, my apologies. In that case...

Nitpick: AoEs don't necessarily fill the whole area; a lightning bolt isn't necessarily a solid 5-by-5-by-120 block of electricity and so forth. But there are definitely plenty of effects where it doesn't make much sense. Actually, it does require a check, sort of. To move onto a narrow...

So you used a non-linear cost (props for using Fibonacci ;)) and still started to see things fall apart when you hit mid levels; seems like the common experience from what I've seen. Even [level]^2 isn't always enough, though I haven't tried enough variations personally to get a good sense of it.

I don't know about the other posters here, but this is how I post on other forums and how I talk in real life, with plenty of digressions, examples, parentheticals, asides, qualifications, and so forth. Pedantry, thy name is Eldritch_Lord. Just be glad that "talking" with us online means you...

Points-based casting flat-out doesn't work with D&D spells if you use a linear cost, the reason being that spell levels do not increase linearly. A gate spell is not worth nine sleep spells. Spell power is closer to exponential (i.e. a spell of level X is roughly equal to 2 spells of level...

To keep post length in check, assume anything I don't respond to is something I agree with or at least agree-to-disagree with. That we agree on. When I say flavor-based and effects-based, I'm not saying that effect-based systems can't or don't have flavor, I'm talking about the "inputs," in...

First of all, +1 to everything Kamikaze Midget said. You made this post a heck of a lot shorter. ;) I'm going to spoiler my replies since this post is a bit long-winded. Warning: massive wall of text, work was slow this afternoon. Please don't think I'm trying to hammer away at your...

I'm proposing nothing of the sort. The reference to 3e Feint was to show an example of a mechanic that implements the effect "trick an enemy into doing something" in a way that players find acceptable and "realistic" because it covers corner cases, integrates existing mechanics, and has an...

Note: I don't claim to speak for all fans of pre-4e D&D here, I'm just going off some of the trends I've noticed on the various D&D forums when discussing 4e martial mechanics I think part of the disconnect with nonmagical forced movement and such is that D&D (at least pre-4e) has a fairly...

Power sources weren't really decried from a conceptual standpoint; as the Jester noted, they were mostly decried because they either didn't do anything (Martial, Arcane, and Primal didn't really have shared mechanics, just a shared theme) or did too little (Divine had Channel Divinity, but every...

Two points. 1) Trying to turn things into a rolling vs. roleplaying dichotomy is really losing out on a lot of benefits of the 3e system. If you roleplay everything out, that can be good for immersion, but players whose characters are supposed to be suave and charming might feel like their...