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While I would agree with this statement (modern WotC has no interest in the OGL), this playtest agreement is fundamentally identical to the one I signed for 3.0. Nor is it radically different from any other playtest agreement I've ever signed. About the only thing I'd consider even a little...

Did anyone else happen to notice the "0 hp = suck" rules? It's either avoid reaching 0 hp or you're knocked out of the combat. "0 hp = suck" ruined more than a few games for me in the past. Having this stupidity brought back is not a good thing. In fact, it irritates me more than vancian being...

Nope. Much like the team responsible for the playtest revision, you've missed the point: The DM isn't supposed to figure out the story bits. The Caves of Chaos simply exist. It's up to the players to figure out what they want to do with it. A story may come out of that; but it will be in the...

4E does create something of a void here in presentation (if not necessarily practice), but in both 2E and 3E movement rules are presented as a contiguous whole both in and out of combat. (Movement is defined by time, not by circumstance.) Yes. Mechanics for breaking off combat and entering a...

This is something of a distortion, however. The paladin wasn't presented as a distinct class in Supplement I: A paladin was just a specific flavor of the Fighter class, with special abilities that could only be unlocked if you had a sufficiently high Charisma and swore to never perform chaotic...

That would be incorrect. Although it didn't use the term "opportunity attacks", AD&D did include opportunity attack mechanics. The term "attack of opportunity" actually comes from the AD&D 2.5 rulebooks, but those rules simply centralized several mechanics that had been present since AD&D1...

I think it's important to understand that there are actually three separate issues people have with "long rest = everything gets reset". Thinking of them as separate (albeit related) issues is crucial for productive discussion. Otherwise you just end up talking past each other. (1) Hit point...

Not entirely accurate. If your Dex modifier is -1, then studded leather gives you AC 12 and ringmail gives you AC 13. But, yes, for any neutral or positive Dex modifier studded leather is superior. This appears to be the general point: The higher your Dex modifier, the more you'll benefit from...

Not exactly. Because it's actually a larger problem than that: Not only are there not rules for running away, but if you actually apply the rules that DO exist for movement then running away is difficult or impossible. So it's not just the players saying, "Hey, let's try something there are no...

This is pretty much the best you're going to get. Remember Step #1, though: Your wizard needs to always have the perfect spell prepared for every situation. Or, alternatively, cast more spells in a day than they actually have available to them. (Oh, but it won't be that many because they'll...

The difference is that there's actually a system for resolving ranged attacks in D&D. There is no system for running away post-1989. The equivalent would be if there were no rules for ranged attacks in D&D and your response was, "Well, people just need to invest in magic missile spells." That...

You have that exactly backwards. Giving players information with which they can make informed decisions isn't railroading. Predetermining how the PCs will interact with the monster you've created, OTOH, is railroading. In regards to enabling retreats: OD&D solved this problem by having rules...

The problem has two ultimate sources: (1) DMs who create the expectation that all encounters will be "level appropriate" and then try to shift things up. (2) The lack of a decent game structure for retreating. (This has been missing from D&D since at least 1989, IIRC.)

Will you be publishing the rumored sequels? Or are you just offering the same cliffhanger?

90% of everything is crap. You can attempt to control the crap-shoot of product selection by reading reviews, asking about the product on forums, following trusted creators, or focusing on proven publishers. In the case of your particular examples, you're talking about Mongoose. This is a...

There was a period of time in which I used a "being helpless provokes" house rule. Worked just fine. My rationale with AoO/OAs is generally: "Anything that takes your focus (mental or physical) off defending yourself provokes." Since modern iterations of the game have already completely...

First: That's not being caused by the escalating numbers. That's being caused by dropping players into a scenario where they aren't familiar with a panoply of options possessed by their characters. This will slow down their decision-making process, which will slow down combat resolution. Now...

That's nice. But completely irrelevant. Mike Mornard, on the origins of the cleric: The origin point of the D&D cleric is literally the character of Van Helsing. Like pretty much everything in D&D, the class was transformed as it moved from its pulp origins to game mechanics. But the closer...

Dracula was pretty pulpy, actually.

Ultimately, it's unavoidable: The story of "learning the alien language" looks pretty much identical every time you do it. So doing it more than once on a TV show is going to be boring; and it's also going to chew up narrative time so that everything else on the TV show also suffers.