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The players don't have the DM's notes. And it's very, very possible for them to miss things, or not make the connections that seem so obvious at the DM's end of the table. Especially when there's a week between sessions, or when the players just plain aren't as interested in your world, NPCs...

Nice thing to do if you've got the time to spend on that. But there's still no guarantee they haven't missed your main plot points, despite the notes, though.

You can end up writing constantly instead of really playing and with a whole lot of useless notes this way. I've had a player do it really thoroughly before, and felt guilty that I was feeding them this information that wasn't really worth noting down, because I'd improvised it on the spot...

I don't really see a downside to this: 1) It suggests that there's going to be more than one option available to PCs at a time, meaning that they may be attempting to bring an end to the railroading culture of D&D. 2) Who hasn't, as a player, lost track of the DM's "subtle" machinations? What...

I agree that it should be gone, but can't get on board with the "cannot roleplay" comment. It's highly fashionable to dispose of alignment, and good for an offshoot looking to distinguish itself from D&D, but ultimately constitutes shortsighted design for the main game IMO. Alignment is one of...

Gah. I don't care about your darn morally ambiguous barbarians, I just want orcs slayable without going into correspondence! Barbarians aren't nearly as good villains as orcs for "take their stuff" purposes, because there's a huge possibility that they might actually be the good guys etc...

I disagree. It means you need the next wandering encounter to fill out a questionnairre with questions like: Are you a (a) sentient being who eats people, (b) a sentient being who doesn't eat people but murders them anyway, (c) not sentient at all, or (d) other? When was the last time you...

The assumption might be that you'll be playing a lot online, using the virtual miniatures you've bought from them. One drawback is that this is relatively easily rendered redundant by someone out there making a freeware clone of the paper and pencil D&D online software, because official...

Heh, no, I meant what I said. Thinking of savants in particular here. I gather that it's common for them to specialise in something akin to worldbuilding (with strict boundaries), such as the guy who conceived an entire imaginary european city in his head. Autism (and to a lesser extent...

And why? Because they have a stereotype of being goody-two-shoes. Take away their white-hat-until-proven-otherwise status and you wouldn't have that attitude towards them. Excellent demonstration of the unintuitive paradox I'm referring to. You've basically made my argument for me. A D&D...

If M:tG was a license to print money, then Magic Online took away the printing costs. I have a vague memory of it being some sort of success? Money for jam. At a guess, WOTC has looked at D&D and thought, "hey, we can do the same thing we did with virtual cards with virtual miniatures."...

D&D is a game. If it sets up strong tropes and archetypes, then you'll seem all the more edgy, maverick, progressive and clever if when you "break type" and have a good orc. Build moral ambiguity into the rules and it's no longer big or clever, just yawnful (and annoying that you can't just...

Putting aside the fact that 4E has arguably failed in a major design goal if it needs a character creator to efficiently make NPCs, this will be very quickly outflanked by 3rd party volunteer efforts. Just look at all the character creators for 3E. The only way they can keep this from...

And you get something physical from that. Online subscription magazines failed back in the dotcom days. In fact, the whole thing smacks of dotcom era naivety. MMORPGs give you something tangible - basically the equivalent of a theme park ride, upfront. DI, from what we've heard, gives you...