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How can a person can argue that a 20% trade-in value is unacceptable yet a 50% trade-in-value is perfectly fine is beyond me. I make this statement because it betrays a faulty, irrational logic in the sense of Verismilitude, Aesthetics, and Narrative Control.1. Verismilitude Strict...

Thankfully, there is nothing in the 4th Edition rule books that call anything "Mundane", because they are called "Martial". In a world where Dwarves, Dragons, and Halflings, creatures that Do Not Exist without a substantial non-mundane explanation, we can live with Olympic-esque combat...

You wandered into two strong opinion's I've had about the 4e Power System and Combat as a whole: 1- What makes the ability to do something at-will "not-magic"? Is there a necessary intrinsic conception that Magic needs to be large, impressive, and non-utilitarian rather than be a...

Magic Items are tied to an Adventurer's health, and should be compared to the Price of Health and/or Life Insurance for skydivers and airplane test-pilots. Going from +1 to +6 isn't even laughably the same as choosing which mass-produced style of ammunition you want to use at the range...

How about if a DM said that you had to either use a Knowledge (Literature) or Craft (Poetry) skill to find or make a poem, respectively, but a Perform (Poetry) to actually say it aloud? Again, we're drifting far down the "Roleplaying isn't a Game system decision" stream.

While I understand that you can be feeling like D&D is moving away from your personal idea of what fantasy is, you spent a thousand words without actually saying how this is so. You need to spend less time being a politician / demagogue and actually contribute to the discussion by providing...

The big reason that a table-top roleplayer complains about WotC not considering their sort of gamer as a "target audience" is because D&D is a large-group activity. Therefore, if the D&D shifts its focus away from your preferred style, it will be harder to find a group that enjoys your style to...

Why roll the dice then? Diceless RPGs are better for getting the specific flavor you want if you are going to be hard-hitched to a "Good Wins" trope. Worf Barrage called, wants its respect back; sometimes using the Turbo Attack that the BBEG survives from is the cool moment. Missing the...

Sneak Attack isn't really an equivalent comparison here. A rogue using Sneak Attack still has a bucket-full of risks to deal with, while without it he is Skill Monkey the Useless. Meanwhile, a wizard in the preferred fly environment has only a handful of inherent risks, while without he is...

You couldn't define High Magic without at least 5 references and a sheet of caveats. D&D is functional magic, workman's magic, but "high" is a wishy-washy term with little bearing. Any magic is "high" compared to none, and all the matters of degree are lines in the sand. Meanwhile, a...

I have never read a high fantasy (Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis) that included the Rocketeer or his medieval counterpart. High Magic =/= High Fantasy. If I design my encounter with egregious amounts of metagaming to handle something, at some point between "use terrain" and "everyone has...

You doubt the importance of Thor? Lightning Bolts for you then. Reams of TPKs are decided on the whim of a dice-roll. Multiply that with a larger cost of death than "another sheet of paper or some meta-game resource". If my other choice was "Death By Orcs", sure. 5:1, in the non-linear...

I'm glad that my encounter design for a group that uses Swords & Sorcery that is defeated by Superheros was merely my own (many) terrible mistakes. "Put it off for later" only works when the campaign ends directly after its use.

I liked my own homebrew Gnomes, in which I swapped the "speak with burrowing mammal" ability to a "speak with air-breathing water animal" ability, and turned them into Short Samoan/Pacific Islander types that would stab you with a poisoned dagger if you looked at them wrong. But yeah, I hate...

"Raldar touched his helmet, and noticed that the slash only dented the metal. Shifting it around so that he could see, he made a strong attack." Essentially, In the same way you explain that you can only move 6 spaces in an attack action or the Wizard can only ever cast his Daily spell once a...

Oh, you forget that in 2E, you could have as many NPCs as you want sling around the Banned Spell and still keep it out of the hands of the players mechanically. Doing the same in 3E was impossible- the spell either didn't exist or could be learned. edit: ninja'ed like Oriental Adventures.

However when I was working in 2E there was no way to gain new spells without your DM gifting them: there was no inherent versatility of the Wizard Class because there were zero inherent spells: if your DM decided that Charm Person was impossible to find, it was. You could note that I was...

His reasoning is that the utility of Wizards is fairly constrained in 1e/2e; because the lack of dedicated subsystems and hard-coded game assumptions worked against the spellcaster from being anything but Artillery-Focused with some additional tricks. So therefore if the common scope of the...

Really? Does that mean that Dragons qualify for Arcane Power feats, because they have magical powers? Why can't they open up their magic breath elsewhere? Could they produce their breath in an anti-magic field? Would the fire breath stop at the edge of an effect? If you killed all the...

Why? Because you have to have Healing Surges and Dragon's breath explained? When they work, no matter who the target or the source, it always happens according to the mechanics. Because even if sometimes you fail to do something that is exceptional, you are still using an exceptional power...