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I think that's right. With regards to traps, it's about how many resources and how they regenerate. In different ways, 3e and 4e both had problems where healing was sufficiently plentiful to make damage between encounters mostly irrelevant to the PCs. Compare to BECMI / 1e / 2e, where healing...

Good design can always get around the limitations of the system, but it's still fair for DMs to want 15 points of damage between encounters to have some effect. It's always better when a dungeon has enough internal logic that setting off a trap affects the rest of the environment, but a boring...

Having played D&D for 20 years or so without having heard the idea "rules as written," I share the yearning for going back to a place where there is no "one true way" of playing the game. I understand the advantage of standardization for pickup games and organized play, but pickup games and...

I don't think more than 10% of the 5E GMs will ever have the mental focus and time management skill to get through a 1 hour game in less than 90 minutes. :) -KS

Very close indeed. I love ending my adventures with a massive, tactically-ineresting slugfest too. It's the non-climatic, 4th-in-a-row slugfests that I could do without. In any case, I completely agree that a satisfying D&DN needs to include the ability to have these long-lasting...

I completely agree that player choice is the key part of combat, although I'll add the caveat that it's the presence of an interesting player choice that matters. "Heads or tails" is a choice, but it's rarely an interesting choice since you lack the knowledge to make an informed decision...

I'm inclined to think that themes would help individual PCs create characters who are different from ordinary members of their race (e.g. an elf with an appropriately "urban" theme). But I don't think themes will handle the heavy lifting for a campaign where the races are substantially...

Your conflating two issues. As you say, in every edition of D&D, it's better to face 10 monsters one at a time instead of all at once. That's just because the PCs can concentrate file more effectively with individual monsters without giving the others monsters extra time to attack the PCs. In...

I think it's fair to criticize WotC for creating a whole new rules system when a revision is an alternative, but I think it's important to note that (1) it's not like the encounter-to-adventure change is the only think they are doing with D&DN and (2) WotC gets a lot of flack for "revision"...

This is all about choosing good defaults, and the defaults should include the classic cultures associated with the races. There are two primary reasons for this. First, only experienced players are going play these races with alternate cultures, and the new players need to be taught what these...

The one hour game is really a stress test. A good GM can cram more into a session than an average GM. If a good GM can make a one hour game work, then the average, tired, adult, weekday night GM can run a satisfying session in the two-and-a-half hours they have to run. But, yeah, a great...

Describing the basic of a core setting isn't a waste of space. New players and GMs need to learn the default shared assumptions of D&D, and the rulebook is exactly the right place to do that. As an example, there's nothing wrong with having a campaign where orcs have been wiped out and...

The idea of giving monsters identifying traits is a good one, but the implementation needs to differ from monster to monster. For a creature like a beholder or a gelatinous cube, you are rarely going to meet more than one at a time. So, the identifying trait is more about "how is this monster...

The key to all this is that the definition of "core" is going to change. In 3e, "core" meant a small subset of the rules. In 4e, "core" meant almost anything published. In D&DN, "core" is going to mean something else. My expectation is that "core" is going to mean the least complicated...

If opening up D&D feels like opening up a textbook, you have a serious problem. Engagement is at least as much a function of the core books as consumption. Yes, you need to be able reference the rules effectively, but D&D is an immersive experience and reading the books should make you...

So would you suggest that undead are generally vulnerable to displays of holy symbols, but that clerics (and, presumably, other divine characters) are better at employing these techniques than others? I think it's a nice idea that the fighter, down to 4 hit points and surrounded by skeletons...

I think this is an excellent point. Undead tend to have particularly nasty melee-hit effects, so a weakness that can keep them out of melee for a few rounds is a useful counter-balance. For those who think it's finicky for undead to have a special weakness line on their stat block, I disagree...

I really like the idea that the "to hit" bonus of magical swords would have a very limited range. I'd say that +1 to +3 is better than +1 only, but either way the great idea here is providing more impact (as it were) on the damage bonus side and reducing the total effect on the to-hit math. -KS

As a starting point, I'm not entirely sure how the post you're responding to relates to damage scaling. The point I'm suggesting is that identifying +1 magic weapons as "level 1" items is an example of starting too low. If a +1 magic weapon was a 3rd-to-5th level item, then you have design...

Magic items contain an example of this problem. Adding +1 to hit and damage is a pretty excellent magical ability. When the designers of 4e dubbed a "+1 magic weapon" as a canonical example of a 1st level magic item, they threw the balance off the entire magic item equation. The level 1 "+1...