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Well, there's balance and then there's balance. One of the things 4E tries to do is balance DM attention per player. I mean, if I can glance down at my laptop and finish up an entire excursion in Diablo by the time your beastmaster has finished resolving the actions of his wolf pack, 5 horses...

I'm guessing "define your own damage model" falls under that? I guess we'll have to chalk this up to differences of opinion then. For the life of me I can't see why in a game with eladrin wizards and dragonborn paladins (or if you'd rather, half-elf warlocks and dwarven clerics) there's a need...

Keying off of some magical or non-obvious lock is probably a good way to do this. Put an "obvious dressing feature", like cave paintings or a mural, in your early dungeons. It'll be nice for thematic continuity, making it seem like your dungeons are just monsters moving into the remnants of the...

Point of order. The modern DC Occult line, especially under Alan Moore, advances an idea present in many occult comics but brought into stark contrast in Astro City's Shadow Hill: the paranormal can and must be understood by the normal. Since the world itself is not a teeming mass of chaos...

Well, yes, and the muscle tears and strained ligaments that come with parrying off an ogre's club rather than letting it crush your fragile human ribcage (but still losing 24 hit points) are also "injuries". But continuing the potentially inappropriate quantum physics analogies, these are...

This is probably a good way to approach "saving something for later" - something that looks significant but which the players can't artificially bypass (ie tunnel through 250' of rock to get around a magic barrier).

Yep. Keep in mind by "crack" I don't mean "your skull splits open" I mean "hit your head sharply". Your brain's rattled so much it jumps the rails but the body's intact. Drowning similarly. You just run out of air and consciousness cuts off, and you can "be revived" if someone clears your lungs...

I disagree that real injuries even need to be taken if a character died. Plenty of people die all the time by, say, falling down and cracking their heads, or drowning, and heck, even if you want to get into mythology, at the end of John Henry, John just lays down his hammer and he dies, with the...

Picking a size to manifest is tricky. On the one hand, physical beings are often intimidated by size. On the other hand, it's nice for the minions to be able to complete a monument to your greatness within a single-digit multiplier of their own lifespans. Tiamat probably just figures that by...

I love how you're making the two giant assumptions that a) only people who are badly wounded ever die and b) death in 4e constitutes what we in the modern age would call clinical death. I mean, if a guy gets KOed by a purple dragon's MIND CRUSH, what's wrong with saying that he just kind of...

Two more problems: 1 - a giant list of contingencies to plan for makes the problem of creating a damage model seem more imposing than it actually is. Actually it makes it seem as imposing as it actually is, but people make things out to be more imposing than they actually are, so you have to...

On the contrary. If you could get somebody to believe that mustard was a flying alien, that would be MAD creative. Can't you just see a little glass jar bobbing down the condiments aisle at Kroger's, getting more and more furious until it starts breaking out the death rays?

But the thing is, you'd be wrong, at least when you're put up against other humans told to judge your responses based on creativity. That's the giant paradox of the whole thing - that when told to judge how creative something is, people judge it by how different it is from what they themselves...

If you tell people to come up with an alien that swims, people will make a fishoid, because fish swim. Tell them to come up with one that flies, they make a birdoid, because birds fly. Tell them to come up with one in general, they make a forehead person. Give them an example, they follow the...

It's actually not, surprisingly. Work by Ward and others (for example "Structured Imagination" in Cog Psych 27:11 pp 1-40, 1994) demonstrates the idea that people asked to come up with a creative idea and given an example will tend to hew very closely to that example. It's why most SF aliens...

I thought that there being absolutely no mechanic supporting hit point loss having any effect that won't go away when you rest and/or sleep was enough explanation that, y'know, hit point loss doesn't have any mechanical effect that won't go away when you rest and/or sleep. There are two things...

There's a warlock feat that gives you another pact. I think it was paragon tier, but can't remember. Maybe make these feats paragon tier but you can take one at first level anyway?

Actually every monster has one or more relevant "knowledge" checks, and if the PCs nail one of them they get an idea of what a monster's powers are. So if Irontooth is natural, anybody nailing a Nature check knows what he does and when.

Sense motive only lets you read somebody's mind if you can manage a 100. Otherwise you'd just know the king wasn't being entirely truthful. But the wonder of argumentum ad baculum (argument by big stick) is that even if you call the bluff you still get baculumed. Alternately, if the king was...

But the thing is, you only need to pack up the fruits and veggies once, at the start of your journey. Similarly, when you come up with the character concept you can also come up with a damage model. And if circumstances change - say, your martial character starts realizing his epic destiny as...