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Being a protagonist has nothing to do with success or failure (or the expectation of success), but everything to do with having a certain degree of control over your own action, to be the driving force behind the things happening to you, be they good or ill. You might not think of your players...

Generally speaking, PCs are the protagonists within the confines of a specific campaign. Others might move the plot/the action/the "world-stage" along, but all of those things happen behind the DM's screen and the players have very little control over such things (except when events happen as a...

3E (or was it just 3.5) had a system that sorta, kinda did that, I think they called it "associated levels", where they said adding cleric or wizard levels to giants and ogres did not increase their CR as much as adding fighter or barbarian levels. This had two perverse effects, where an...

To put it simply, within both the fiction of the game and the mechanics of the game, they fulfill very different roles and are meant to be used in completely different ways.

It's also quite informative; some of the people who defend 3.X as a "totally not broken and unbalanced game" are actually not using the rules as written or intented.

Not necessarily, depending on how those spells are "siloed" and how many there are, you could see more diversity. Let's say the "dread necromancer" tradition (I am totally making things up here) as the choice between ray of enfeeblement and haunting (a minor fear effect I just totally made up)...

The basics of the game seem very solid. As a guy who's been playing RPGs for what, 5 years maybe, it looks like he has a very solid grasp on cool and efficient gameplay mechanics. I'm kinda jealous to be honest...

I don't feel that wizards (or any spellcaster/character in general) possessing one or two abilities that can be called upon again within a shorter timeframe will alter playstyle dramatically as long as the power of such abilities falls within a certain spectrum. It couldn't be as "encounter...

Why not? D&D was never really about "low" or "high" magic. It's really its own thing that defies that scale. It has, from its core 4 classes, 2 that are full-time spellcasters. If you go beyond the "fighter-rogue-cleric-wizard" spectrum, 2nd edition had only two classes (fighter and thief)...

Actually... That's Steven Winter on one fan's reaction to a column written by AD&D Second Edition designer Zeb Cook for Dragon Magazine. There's always been vitriol, hate and impotent nerdrage whenever a new edition comes out, it just used to be "slower", I think. I mean, looking at that...

I'd argue that the number of options didn't increase that much, just that their relative effectiveness was increased dramatically compared to 1st/2nd edition's dependency on DM fiat, and 3E sim-lite bent that made everything that wasn't a spell really hard to pull off consistently. I mean, you...

... I was being facetious... apparently I failed to convey that. I'll try harder next time.

I'll simply counter that by saying I was playing wizards and clerics the way they are meant to be played: you know, lightning bolts, fireballs and cure [X] wounds... :p

That's not completely fair, though. See, by core (and aside from the druid, who's a totally different shade of broken), the wizard and cleric ARE pretty boned by an encounter with a golem. Few problems with that "balance" though: 1) so's the fighter if the DM hasn't given him an adamantite...

Thanks. I want to leave this alone for now, but it feels nice to know I'm not the only one who's perception of this situation was similar. Having my argument that a perceived slight against an imaginary race was akin to racism really took most of the enthusiasm I had towards this thread. I'll...

I think a tangential question is in order: How many classes can they fit in the book? If it's a standard, PHB-sized one (3.X/4E style), I think we could see anywhere between 9 and 12 classes depending on the space allowed for each. Then the question becomes what is the core experience of D&D...

But I'm not being dismissive, I'm simply contextualizing the video in relation to the rest of the... well "human experience". You can analyze the subtext, try to discern author intent from dissecting the words used and those notused, go through the cartoon frame by frame to find "the truth"...

I don't get the whole "tone" argument. I simply looked at this game from an adult standpoint. Back in 2007, I had no bias for or against 4E, I loved 3.5, played it pretty consistently, but I also recognized its flaws. I was 26 then, and didn't see them making jokes about gnomes or grappling...

You're right, but don't you agree that a cartoon is a pretty silly thing to get upset over. Particularly one that was meant to be "funny"? I mean, say it wasn't funny, that's a valid complaint. Say you disagree with the portrayal of gnomes and/or tieflings in the cartoon, that's a valid...

Here's the thing about the whole "gnome situation": nobody was poking fun at anybody. Nobody was dismissing your tastes or your preferences. The motivation behind their exclusion as a player race was explained by the designers at the time by the fact that, in the context of the D&D world, they...