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Honestly, considering how entrenched and toxic many "online communities" and fanbases have become (or, perhaps, have always been), I kinda wish WotC could afford to disregard us all. Or perhaps we could just nuke the internet? "ENWorld by snailmail"... your complaint over [X] edition must be...

Pfffft. More like a d12, high critical. If I've learned anything from Clue, it's to never underestimate the power of a candelabra. ;) Edit: Damn my French-version of that boardgame; it's candlestick, not candelabra. Still, a candelabra is like a dire candlestick, so my point stands.

I also believe they had financial reasons for going forward with 3.5, I just don't think it was the sole or even main motivator. Tough, but possible if you bend the encounter building rules a bit and use MM3 math. A first level NPC with a greataxe could do it on a crit. Short of sleep (which...

The short version is: he destroyed the in-game economy of the campaign. With scribed scrolls, crafted wands and wondrous items, he negated most challenges straight off the bat. Even after I cut gold rewards by 90% (yep, I modified my "playstyle" from the expected DMG guidelines for wealth by...

Not really. Compared to other RPGs, D&D has had a relatively slow edition turnout rate. By itsself, 4th edition (and now Next) is pretty much in the average for how soon after the previous edition it came out (the real outlier being the switch from 1st to 2nd, 11 years, which can probably be...

The designer I obliquely mentionned was Mike Mearls. The design leads for 4E were all in-house guys from the 3E era; Bruce Cordell has been working on D&D since the TSR days. Everything I read in the ramp-up to 4E was to the effect that they knew, from consumer-survey data and their own...

No, really, it's not. When the lead designer of the next edition basically comes out and says in an official article that spellcasters can and did wield too much power and said in the interview that got him his job at WotC that clerics were the most overpowered class in 3rd edition D&D, it's...

My preferred option is not presented in the poll: no scaling.

Yes, we must keep our blessed hobby, based largely around the stories of loincloth-clad barbarians, frolicking elves, singing bozos in yellow boots, badly dubbed kung-fu movies and games where small lead figurines were moved on a table to "simulate" battles, all of those pure, unadultered works...

Compared to the despicable survey we got for spells, this one felt a lot more complete. Still, it's obvious the designers have no clear way forward with this game as they are still stuck with the idea of designing for "feel". I just hope that, like the game (which is thankfully still 2 years...

To get back to the original, intended topic, I'd like to see human cultures be further defined, but I believe that those would have to be campaign specific. An Aundairian from Eberron or a woman raised on the Sword Coast of Faerun could have different cultures and possess different bonus, for...

Nice defence, there. The "fundamentals" of D&D wizards is "cast spells", not "has a spell selection of 4/3/2 at level 6". You are confusing mechanics with the fiction they are meant to support, and, even in D&D fiction, the arbitrary restrictions of the vancian system are rarely ever present...

I wanted to answer to this little bit here, but it got lost in the shuffle. You are perfectly right in saying that players rarely share the exact same expectations when they sit down to game, but I do believe they share one, at least: they want to play the same game. And in D&D, that has...

Nobody ripped the foundations out of anything; every edition since 2nd as had a different and or variant take on spellcasting. Heck, designers have been trying to break away from the vancian mould for as long as I have been playing this game (1992). What's more, 4E wizards still memorize...

In some cases, sure, why not. In the real world, it has happened that a horrible individual espoused a "good" idea or concept. What I'm saying is that, in game design, it's a questionnable idea, inspired by questionnable ideals, spawned by questionnable people. Roleplaying games should never...

Oh, I'll amend my previous statement then: You are paraphrasing an actual, real-world, meth-head, serial-killer-worshipping, hypocritical sociopath to bolster an argument against equality, transparency and fairness. Thanks for pointing this out. Mod Note: Please see my post below. ~Umbran

You do realize you're quoting a (ficticious) freaking sociopath to bolster your "argument", right? It's also a terrible "argument" to make about a collaborative game: YES, every player around the table deserves a chance to be bloody special, it's everybody's freaking game.

This is conflating the "Game" of D&D with the "game" that goes on around the table. In D&D, you should not be punished for choosing to play a certain class, a certain race or picking a certain option if it fits thematically with your character. When you are playing the game though, nobody is...

Absolutely not. Not in a game with as wide an audience as D&D. You need a starting point, a common ground where every campaign starts. That common ground needs to be fair to all players of the game. From there, GMs can modify it to their heart's content and make it whatever they wish it to be...

They can't (presume, that is). That's kind of the point. So either they try to take into considerations EVERY conceivable playstyle (an impossible task for a game as wide-reaching as D&D, but that could be achieved by a very targetted, niche game) or the designers must abstract a sort of...