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If you love True20, what is it you're striving for here? Where do you think the power curve currently comes from in D&D? As I said earlier, I think it comes from the confluence of increasing bonuses all stacked together. It's not the base +1 per level or +1/2 per level, but the bonuses on...

In Monte Cook's old Line of Sight column, he has an article called "D&Disms" that he almost called "The Genius of D&D". In it, Monte goes against conventional wisdom to claim that some of D&D's great strengths have always been: levels, classes, hit points, and dungeons. Newer games have...

This issue of how the numbers progress has come up before, and I actually believe that many of the numbers don't progress nearly enough -- at least if we want them to match "realistic" expectations. In many ways, characters (in 3E, at least) aren't competent enough, given how the d20 combat...

I don't think the problem comes from bonuses that increase by one per level or one-half per level. I think it comes almost entirely from stacking multiple different bonuses that all increase with level. If a Fighter's BAB increases with level, his Str bonus increases with level, the "buffs" he...

How is an attack against a defense different from a save? (Or are you pleased by some of the other changes they made to formerly save-or-die attacks?)

Treating attack and defense bonuses as "all relative" is arguable the exact opposite of "old school style verisimitude". Further, if we do advance attack and defense bonuses but do not advance hit points at all, we end up with something much closer to old-school lethality. If we do the math...

So, a legendary archer would be no more likely to hit his target?

Intellectual property law can be rather complicated, but copyright does not apply to ideas, just to specific expressions of those ideas; it doesn't apply to game mechanics, just to the specific text in a game book. Theoretically, someone could have tried to patent their game mechanics, in the...

While I agree that balanced classes shouldn't upset people who don't care about balance, the issue is that designing balanced classes isn't always easy, and sometimes efforts to balance classes (or monster powers, or whatever) ruin the feel. For instance, 4E's Fighters do (arguably) feel like...

Looking back at the original poem, it's not even clear that the vorpal blade beheaded the jabberwocky -- until it was already dead, that is: 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "Beware the Jabberwock...

Excellent point, Quickleaf. The designers really need to step back and ask, what are all the cool things that happen in a fantasy adventure story? It's jarring to step outside a super-complete rule set to do the things you want to do, so the designers should provide plenty of "hooks" in the...

Certainly balance shifts based on play conditions, but that doesn't mean there's no central tendency. You should probably ask, what does level even mean? If we were designing a pure simulation, we might ask, how much does a fighter learn about fighting by overcoming a dozen foes in a dungeon...

Exactly. The point of a vorpal weapon is not to decapitate foes; it's to bypass all the mechanics that make high-level characters immune to ordinary weapons doing hit-point damage.

We've been discussing hit points quite a bit on the forum, and we've been contrasting them with D&D's other major mechanic for handling mortal threats: save-or-die. To summarize, a save-or-die mechanic is more realistic for most threats, because just about anything can kill you -- or can fail...

Why?

Really, you should be able to chop off a monster's head without a vorpal weapon. If you look at 3E's vorpal enhancement, it's really a bad deal -- unless your goal is put some fear into complacent high-level characters. A 1-in-20 chance of killing on any hit is nowhere near as lethal as the...

While it's hard to do in a published game, like D&D, I love the idea of a wizard who's the only character who knows anything about how magic really works -- and everyone else has to trust him. This can end up rather benign, as with Gandalf, or not so benign, as in most Dying Earth stories.

Really? If a wizard's so smart, why isn't he also a skilled warrior? Gandalf is not a minstrel with a lute, certainly, but what does he do? First and foremost, he knows stuff -- legends & lore. Second, he persuades people -- he gets Bilbo and Frodo to go on adventures, he inspires Theoden...

Who is making these magic items on spec, and who is carrying all that inventory?

Or you could redefine hit points to be hero points. I don't know where the 35-percent figure came from, but falling a great distance is not certain death -- and in a game like D&D, rounding a one-percent chance of survival up to 1-in-20 seems reasonable.