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Trying to make a system of items that's balanced is not worthwhile in my opinion, true. You yourself said, "The fact that I (as the DM) have to keep an eye out for new rule options that screw up game balance is hardly anything new." So what has this new "system of items that's balanced" given us...

Apologies, I somehow missed that you were using 2e in original post. I too played/DM'd 2e for many years, and to be honest, I probably prefer it to even E6 3e. If all of my players still had their books, I'd probably steal a couple of things from 3e and go back to running modified 2e. Good...

I'm not implying it, I'm outright saying it; If the designers feel the need to tell me how "cool" the mechanic/fluff/monster is, rather than just telling me about it and letting its coolness become apparent than yes, I feel it is less "the best word to describe it" and more "propaganda". That...

In my opinion 4e is being designed with more implied setting than any previous edition, and with a rule set designed to foster a specific style of play. This will, I believe, create a degree of consistency from table to table that hasn't really been seen before. Even the PoL setting feeds into...

Not at all, please go ahead and try away... just don't try to sell it to me as "mission accomplished". I myself think that (and said that) this seems to be a step towards their goal, BUT I don't think that their goal is necessarily worthwhile.

Good question... hmmm. Judges? ... My completely fictional panel of judges says, "Yes, yes it does." Good enough for me. :p

I agree with the point raised by Bishmon. I'd also like to add that the success of d20 as a rule set has created a fairly strong third party presence in the market. Now I haven't been liking most of what I've been seeing about 4e, but let's be realistic... 4e is going to be the biggest RPG out...

The Pit Fiend is a Leader, much like the Warlord as I understand it. Thus the allied devils need the Pit Fiend's command to explode much like a PC needs the warlord to yell "feather me yon oaf" in order to immediately gain a ranged attack. It's the special magic of leaderiness or whatever. In...

Stogoe - My problem with the developers constant use of the word "cool" is this; they're the developers, they developed whatever it is I'm about to read/hear about. I'm going into that assuming that they like it. I doubt that they're going to say, "This mechanic sucks.... it's really lame how...

I've been a bit skeptical of 4e since I heard the announcement, and WoTC saying "cool" about 30 times with every crumb of information released also increased my general pessimism... I've never seen anything that actually was cool that had to be sold that hard. (<--- using a bit of hyperbole...

Unless I'm running a 1-3 month "mini-campaign" to fill a gap between "real" games, I always run sandbox style games. My players expect (read as: DEMAND) that kind of freedom and depth. They want to know where the coins are minted, where the mines that produce the gold are, where the grain in the...

I'm not so sure. The developers have been pretty vocal about making the encounter the base unit of play, that leads me to believe that there will be more 1/encounter abilities as opposed to 1/day abilities. I could be wrong about that, but that is the general impression I am left with at this...

I don't think that the concern is that any given item is too powerful, but rather that certain items will "combine" in a way that is overly beneficial to a particular class/build. When I say "overly beneficial" what I mean is that a build using items with the proper synergistic abilities will be...

In the rare instances that I get to be a player, I always hire non-combatant help. Depending on the campaign setting, I try to get something like a peasant family or the like. The cities are full of almost starving laborers and their families, and the countryside generally has a dirt farmer or...

I guess that's the "new, younger gamers" that WoTC is trying to bring to the table with 4e... :)

In the years that I've been a DM I've had 8 female players. By that I mean steady, playing for at least 2 years at a stretch players, not the girlfriends that got brought for a session or two. I lost one to death, two to a move, two to marriage, and one to a divorce, but I still have two in my...

The following is my take on the “need to be level 11 to use rings” strangeness. Party kills a wizard flavored baddie. Party consists of 5 lvl 8s, Baddie is lvl 11 and surrounded by his lvl 6 lackeys. After the battle, Bill takes the big bad’s shiny gold ring. Putting it on, he finds that...

I think that I would have a much easier time swallowing "second wind" and "I'm healed because a warlord struck an enemy" type of powers if they granted temporary hit points, rather than actually healing damage. Maybe I'm alone on this (and I think I'm alone on most things when it comes to 4e)...

Well, I'm not exactly loving the sound of that. Looks like "non-magical" fighters may be difficult/impossible to pull off under the 4e rules as written, and that's a negative in my opinion. Still, don't want to derail the thread so on to more on-topic stuff. Now I may be alone here, but I...

There are drugs in my campaigns as well, a few are "real-world", mostly things that are grown like marijuana, opium, coca, peyote, and the like (alcohol included, of course). The rest are "fantasy" drugs like Howard's Black Lotus. At the far end of the scale are alchemically and/or magically...