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Please let me add my support to this theme. When 4e was in development, it looked as if the rulebooks would rival White Wolf for fluff cluttering up the rules. Whether by design intent or due to page count limits, it turns out 4e is perhaps the most fluff free of the MMs, carrying just enough...

You are forgetting the concept of "Trademark dilution", which means anything you do which lowers the value of a trademark -- even if you make no money from doing so -- is a violation of the law. A fan-site called "Hot sluts Of Faerun" would be quickly sued for trademark violation, even if it...

No situation, really, except for doing some character building and thinking about ways to build more focused/unique characters. That, and I always felt the sorcerer (few powers, many uses)/wizard (many powers, few uses) split to be tactically interesting.

Yes...the advantage of getting to use a power twice per encounter is, at least in theory, offset by the fact in some encounters, it will never be useful. But this assumes every encounter power is useful in the same percentage of encounters, and I doubt that very much...

Yes.

Would it have any noticeable effect on the game if someone picked the same encounter power twice (when they were able to select another power, or via retraining), allowing them to use it twice/encounter? They still have the same number of powers total, and most encounter powers seem pretty well...

Ah, but how different will a dwarf greatweapon/maul fighter and an elf greatweapon/maul fighter be? That's what I was getting at.

Shadowrun featured strongly archetypal characters forming teams with good niche protection who routinely go on well-defined missions with clear goals. Whether or not the rules use "classes" or "levels" is not really relevant; it's *thematically* very D&Dish, and things like lethality or how...

Yeah, 'cause they didn't before...

This can be worked around; place the coupons in a sealed envelope so it's obvious if someone has ripped it open. Provide 'browsing' copies at low/no cost to stores which order, say, 10 or more; they keep the (couponless) browsing copies on display to let people read through, and then sell a...

Why is it assumed racial choices==class focus? Seriously, I'd love to see something which married "dwarven stolidity" with "arcane mastery". There's a lot of options... Lore Of The Ancients: Dwarf wizards begin play with one extra ritual. Hammercast: A dwarf may embed an attack spell in his...

Interesting. It would be pretty easy, I think, to just toss in At-Will/Encounter/Daily powers for various classes with "You must be an Elf" as a prerequisite, just as some have "You must be using a dagger" or "You must be Fey pact" or whatever. Or even give some powers a "kicker" if you're of...

You know how when you throw something at someone, you yell "Think fast!"? Yeah. It's like that.

One of the things I was looking forward to in 4e, based on the preview books, was that race would be a major factor through your character's life, that a 20th level dwarf fighter would be substantially different from a 20th level human fighter. Unless I'm missing something, this seems to have...

If you want to release under the GSL, sure. If you want to use normal copyright/trademark law... you can probably do quite a bit. Thing is, the OGL actually offered you enough benefits that it was worth giving up some of your existing rights under IP law to get them. The GSL is no carrot, all...

Again, this comes down to copyright/trademark law. Legally, pretty much every setting WOTC/TSR has published is heavily loaded with trademarks, and there's plenty of established legal precedent for that. It's VERY unlikely WOTC would ever issue a formal policy which said "You can use our old...

This is interesting, as FASA was very strongly anti-3e/OGL/D20. A pity, since SR would have converted very easily. Earthdawn is one of the few major gaming systems to slide under my radar over the years; I'm looking forward to seeing a 4e version of it.

I am curious why, given that 4e has been in development for 3+ years, and copyright law hasn't changed meaningfully in that time, this sort of thing wasn't whipped out and gathering dust long before the actual game development was past the first alpha draft of the rules. It's not like...

DMs have been imposing alignment restrictions since the dawn of D&D. This strikes me as a stunning non-issue. I can't remember the last time I was in a campaign where the DM didn't issue some guidelines on alignment, race, class, culture, etc. "Just make up anything that's possible under the...

Yeah, that's my favorite part of 3x, too. :) Simplest solution is to use the NPC rules, and pick the powers which best fit the goal. So if you want someone who can turn invisible, just apply the Wizard template, either via the functional template rules or the NPC rules, and pick...