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It's easy to joke about 30-year-old children, but most societies on earth today -- and all societies of the past -- would view modern American society in much the same way, especially the subset that goes to grad school. Men not working until their 30s? Women not getting married until their 30s?

Indeed. Modern Americans expect to be upwardly mobile, but a pre-modern economy isn't constantly growing, let alone growing faster than the population, so most sons of powerful men are downwardly mobile.

If you look at human growth rates, you can see that modern American children grow at a fairly steady rate until they hit their adolescent growth spurt and then stop growing entirely. It's not hard to imagine elves who don't spurt but just grow at the same steady rate until maturity, and that...

I don't suppose we could beg for a wilderness map, too... (Beautiful work, Weem.)

I think everyone agrees that Ogres should be stronger than Humans, who should be stronger than Gnomes. Giving PCs of those races a bonus or penalty isn't the only way to handle that though. In fact, you could go old school and declare that you can't be an Ogre unless you have an 18 Strength...

This is an interesting question, because almost everyone agrees that the various races should differ, but making each race into an equally "priced" portfolio of powers turns the choice of race into a question with a "right" answer. I can imagine taking away the racial ability bonuses and...

I don't think it's misrepresenting hit points at all to say that they reduce mortal wounds to flesh wounds, and thus they are "just a flesh wound" points. They certainly aren't just physical toughness, they don't make much sense as skill, and they do explicitly include luck, divine favor, etc...

So, you miss the proto-Rogue who almost always failed at his (percentile) skill rolls? More seriously, it sounds like you simply prefer the name Thief to Rogue. And I prefer to call Halfling Rogues hobbit burglars.

Definitely. In fact, 3E was more or less designed with first level as fourth level, as far as the skill system was concerned. Also, many of the class abilities were front-loaded as if that first level comprised three or four levels, which affected multi-classing. I think the real issue is hit...

My understanding of Marvel's recent movie success is that it came about as a reaction to the terrible movies that resulted from hands-off licensing deals. Once Marvel decided to manage its own properties more closely, it was able to produce movies that were true to the original properties, and...

So, when the enemy rolls to hit you and overcome your armor, you shouldn't have any special points that say, "no, it was only a flesh wound!" Am I right?

Excellent point. Also, the problem is exacerbated by starting with math that more-or-less works and then adding bonuses from feats, spells, magic items, etc., from an ever-growing list of options.

If the Wizards of the Coast fail to unite the base, darkness will fall across the land, and it will be up to you to travel the four corners of the known world to collect the long-lost Player Bases of the Four Editions and to bring them together into the One Player Base of Power and restore light...

D&D's hit points never made sense as simple toughness, and there was always fine print somewhere explaining that they weren't meant to be simple toughness, but, when "hits" from weapons doing "damage" reduce your hit points, and "healing" is how you get them back, yeah, they sure seem like...

No, I don't want to play previous editions -- but I do want to recapture the best elements of older editions and the older style of play: namely, DM judgment combined with randomness.

Hmm... maybe magic-user. It seems perfectly natural to me -- partly because D&D's magic-user, cleric, and druid classes have always had peculiar mechanic differences and have lacked the kinds of differences that might make sense (to me). After all, the defining traits of clerics used to be...

I'm sure many folks here are at least casual fans of Lego and may know that Lego has come up with a line of products aimed at girls. They didn't just make everything pink; they sent out cultural anthropologists to research how girls and boys around the world play, and some of their findings may...

Yes, that was my point. Even remotely fair fights would catch up to the PCs very, very quickly. I don't think the goal is to add more "get out of jail free" abilities; rather, it's to shift what kind of "get out of jail free" abilities the PCs have. For instance, if we increase ACs but reduce...

A sword of sharpness or a vorpal weapon is much, much scarier to another PC than to a typical monster. Automatically killing (or crippling) your enemy on a natural-20 to-hit roll makes roughly 10 percent of your attacks lethal (or disabling), which isn't a big deal if you expect to finish off...

Yes, and those four value compound, so that a character who hits twice as often for twice as much damage, and who gets hit half as often and can take twice as much damage, ends up 16 times as powerful -- which is actually powerful enough to take on four times as many enemies (via Lanchester's...