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But that's balancing the wrong things. We don't play "a Race". We play a character. And a Dwarven character has no actual penalties in this case, because simply not being a caster isn't a "penalty" (at least it shouldn't be, unless the system is deeply flawed and brings back caster...

The main reason I oppose alignment restrictions is that I dislike alignment as anything other than a roleplaying aid. A Paladin that considers himself Chaotic Evil might be "wrong", but what about a Paladin that considers himself Lawful Good, worshiping a Lawful Good diety, that other...

I think 4E's default setting was just about perfect. Just enough to have various concepts that could easily be mapped into other settings, but not so much to be unwieldy. And I think the cosmology is great, both on its own, and as something that can easily be mapped into other cosmological...

I want absolutely none of that in 5E mechanics. Especially not Alignment restrictions. And since I abhor rolling stats, ability restrictions wouldn't make much sense for a point-buy system. Those kinds of restrictions are trivial to houserule, so much so that I don't think modules for them...

I've done stuff like this in 4E. A bunch of "minions" with a shared HP pool. The total HP pool was equivalent to a standard monster, and supposing I had 5 minions, each fifth of that HP would remove one of the minions. It works all right, but I don't feel that it is necessarily "better" than...

While this bears the pungent aroma of an advertisement, I'll answer your question at face value: The review mischaracterizes the stated design goals of 5E. 5E isn't about making a single ruleset that combines the "best of previous editions". It's about making a modularized ruleset that can be...

Very good essay, and nails down a lot of the differences in approach I hadn't quite identified. When it comes to D&D, I'm very much about CaS. Always have been, and I think that's why I ultimately found D&D very disappointing until 4E. I definitely come from a board gaming background, first...

Game 1 has my preferred game mechanics. Game 2 has my preferred game mechanics, as an alternative option to "core" mechanics. Should I consider Game 2 obviously better than Game 1? I would say "no", because I have more reason to expect that Game 1 will be well designed, and well balanced...

All restrictions should be based on game mechanics and balance. Design ideas can be inspired by certain flavors or tropes, but the design should still be balanced. If Halflings get zero reach, then they need something else to balance that out. If a good counterbalance can't be found, better...

I would hazard a guess that noone in this thread is advocating use of an actual 100-sided die. I think everyone knows who poor the distribution is on those. d100 is just another term for d%, i.e., some way of generating numbers from 1-100, traditionally done using two d10s.

It's only "obviously better" if the game is balanced and coherent for both including and excluding the module. If the Devs favor a certain ruleset as the baseline, and don't do a good job developing, testing, and balancing the alternative ruleset, then no, the game isn't "obviously better", to...

I think they're great. Not only should they be kept, but used even more widely. Rename them "Heroic Surges" or something, and apply them to more things. Want in-combat healing? Costs a Heroic Surge. Want to cast an encounter-changing spell? Costs a Heroic Surge. Want to cast an...

I did change things quite a bit, so hopefully it'll be clearer now I don't think it's really as essential to have all players directly involved in a skill challenge as it is in a combat, mostly because SCs take so little time. Your b) seems like a perfectly fine situation. In practice though...

New version in OP. No major gameplay changes, but the rules should be clearer, and I added a gameplay example.

I can see what you mean. I added it because I often felt that insight was not a particularly useful skill. In practice, I've been satisfied with the results, but I could see running the system without it. I'm not very explicit about it, but my version of a partial success is where a third...

reserved for design justification

Conflex is a skill challenge system I've been working on, and have been using in a game I'm DMing. I think I've gotten it to a point where it could be useful to others, and I would be interested in hearing thoughts and opinions from others. The system is build around the notion of conflicts...

The PHB doesn't include an index to look up powers by name. This seemed a rather glaring omission, so I made one. I've attached the PDF. I hope you all find it useful! Please let me know if there are any inaccuracies. (I based this on a text index I got here)