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Oddly enough, I've been working on this very issue the last days, for a future blog post. I have a bunch of notes and a spreadsheet, but it will take a lot of rewriting and formatting before they can be read and understood by anyone other than me. Anyway, here is what I've got. The first thing...

Hunters are controllers. The controller role benefits are blurry to say the least, but basically translate to "you get no features but your powers are better". So, where the fighter gains a defender aura and the slayer/thief/scout gain different extra damage mechanics, the hunter gets the...

Actually, MM1 errata has been coming out, a few monsters at a time, for the last seven months. I strongly recommend these articles, since they cover many iconic monsters, and even include some brand new background information to boot!

An interesting point that I found out the other day while rereading the Essentials books is that they actually went and did that, for those books! Sure, it's obvious that the martial E-classes have no daily attacks, but, more subtly, neither do they have any martial daily utilities. Hunters and...

I'm curious about what you found unappealing in Essentials, because you just about described the contents of Heroes of the Fallen Lands above, down to the class and race selection, the increased simplicity and even details like Magic Missile! What is that product missing, for you?

I don't get this point. As far as I can tell, nothing prevents you from ignoring Cha with a Skald and building a Str Skald, a Dex bow Skald or a whatever Skald with melee training, just like you can with a regular bard...

I agree that the loss of Virtues hurts a lot - that was a pretty cool feature. In fact, that alone might make the best 'Skald' build to just use one of the old bards with the Skald Training feat, and take whatever skald aura powers you want - though getting a decent basic attack for that...

>four new class options, based upon the Essentials design paradigm >While I state that these classes are basically Essentials versions, in that they conform to limited options and some preset abilities I think you are overstating the influence of the Essentials paradigm in the book. While...

Regarding high jumps, vertical reach, and other tricky rules, I wrote a visual guide to jumping rules for my blog. I have found it extremely helpful in our games, so perhaps it can be of some use ;)

Not that I agree with Marshall's other points, but that much at least is true. It's fairly common for thieves to tweak their attack bonuses so as to hit on a 2 against an on-level monster: take high dex, accurate weapons, rogue weapon talent, combat advantage, nimble blade, deft blade, and a...

I have stat blocks for about 3/4 of the monsters in the adventure, since we ended up skipping a few encounters - and I should be able to provide at least some rough notes to update the rest. However, not all of them are ready to share yet, since there's plenty of handwritten stuff, as well as...

On the other hand, the PHB Ranger is definitely an NOT easy mode PC to build, so new players may be up for a terrible experience unless they have a more knowledgeable friend that makes the choices for them. The class is ridden with trap options, and a character's performance depends a lot on...

It won't come up very often unless we see a lot more classes with defender aura, but there is one mechanical upside of the current implementation: it can be turned off. This could be relevant in a party with multiple knights/cavaliers, so that players can divert a monster's attention towards one...

There was a detailed preview pdf released for gen con, with enough material to make a playable heroic character: Bladesinger preview content - Gen Con LLC Community

It does play out a lot like a striker - arguably better than a warlock (who is, in time, a better controller most of the time). But that's mostly a matter of labels. The interesting question is: is it any good at whatever it does? What about fun? I'm about to start DMing a paragon game with a...

Having just finished King of the Trollhaunt Warrens, I can say that it is a pretty good module, with interesting and varied locations, and some degree of freedom (though it still is, at its core, a dungeon crawl). It also succeeds in conveying the idea that the PCs are doing more important stuff...

That looks like a hard thing to implement. From what I see, you'd like to do away with anything that improves character stats, and instead focus on adding options when a character gains a level. The problem is, most options in the game are used to increase character stats! Consider feats. There...

It's true that the tested party would sweat to beat those encounters, and might even fail to do so. But that's a pretty tough encounter sequence. I'm not convinced that the system is intended to present that kind of threat, outside of exceptional cases. The DMG describes hard encounters as...

Speaking as the author of one of those tests, I can say that resource management was taken into account. Granted, I didn't try out a full adventuring day (due to time constraints, though I intend to do it at some point in the future), but I played two consecutive on-level encounters with...

(Emphasis mine). I'd like to point out that it works both ways, though. Just like the existence of forum complaints does not automatically mean that something deserves errata, the absence of complaints (or rather, the fact that these complaints do not reach some magic number) is not proof that...