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So ears being pressed up against doors in this dungeon where the ear seekers live was a common enough occurrence to become a factor in an evolutionary process that probably took thousands of years? Come on. That's ridiculous. Just how much traffic does this dungeon get? Is it the local...

Not only that, avoiding ear seekers required metagaming on the part of the PCs. If their characters didn't know about them, there's no reason they should have feared listening at doors. And if they didn't metagame, they ended up with a dead PC. They really were terribly designed monsters.

You're absolutely right that changing the CR/EL system would not allow 1st level 3E characters to fight 20 goblins. But what you have to remember is that it's not just the CR/EL system that's being changed. The whole D&D combat encounter system is being rebuilt from the ground up to allow for...

In the future, we'd rather *design* this stuff to do what it does, so that when you play a trog you have a fun, interesting, reasonably balanced character. This sounds to me like a hint that monsters as characters might be included in the PH2 (or MM2 or DMG2).

Yes, that's another potential problem. The definition of "encounter" can get awfully fuzzy at times. Hopefully this will be addressed.

By this reasoning, there's no point in ever making any changes to the system. We should all still be playing OD&D. Or Chainmail. You seem to be missing one of the major points of the article - that the default assumptions for combat encounters have changed in 4E. It's widely acknowledged and...

I wouldn't say so. Listing the GP value for each of the half-dozen magic items possessed by each of the four high-level NPCs in a particular encounter would take up a lot more space than listing the GP value for a few statues/tapestries/art objects in the room. The treasure can easily be...

Well, given that I've read through dozens of published 3.x adventures by this point and haven't yet seen one that does this, I'm guessing there's probably a good reason why it isn't done. Maybe it's a space issue? Most enemies don't have pearl encrusted gold statues of Blipdoolpoolp, but most...

But the big difference is that the "selling everything off" session won't be nearly AS annoying as it was. If the DM tells the group "You find a statue worth 3,000 gold pieces," whoever keeps track of the treasure can just write the value down on the treasure sheet right then. Then, when it's...

"A lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on." This is doubly true in the age of the internet, so I'm glad that misinformation threads are shut down quickly here.

I agree, but more than the "every enemy has a +1 sword" syndrome, I hate the fact that, in 3.x D&D, high-level characters are nothing without their gear. IMO, high-level characters should be natural badasses. They shouldn't have to strap on a dozen magic items just to be able to do cool things...

Well, they have said that 4E is going to have three "tiers" of play. 1-10 Heroic, 11-20 Paragon, and 21-30 Epic. Hopefully there will be very different playstyles involved with all three.

A great wyrm red dragon has 660 hit points in 3.5, and that's without any of the numerous buff spells it can cast. It's not that big a leap.

It's not the rolling that takes the time, it's the recalculating bonuses for a character when half his buffs get dispelled and half don't. Sure, it's easy to write out stats for a fully buffed character ahead of time (barring combat-specific buffs, of course, which can be a major factor), but...

Even most rogues are probably well over 50% similar, skill-wise, under the 3.x rules.

But at low levels, you have the opposite problem - the d20 is too random for the small bonuses the PCs have. A 1st level fighter might have a +3 total attack bonus - but that +3 bonus is completely overwhelmed by the randomness of the d20 roll. I think this is a big part of the reason why...

Kinda like how the Drow turned out.

I also think there's a fair bit of hyperbole in the original post - I can't imagine that anyone who thinks that hit points and damage aren't fun would be playing any D&D at all, let alone enough of it to frequent an online forum about it.

True, but I don't have a 360 and don't have any plans to buy one anytime soon. So far, nothing on any of the next-gen consoles has managed to grab my interest. I'll wait for some more price drops and take another look, but for now, Bioshock alone isn't enough to warrant a purchase for me.

Well, sure - if you don't mind being surrounded by 20 armed soldiers who are likely going to cut you to ribbons on their next turn. AoOs are not the only factors which can encourage battlefield tactics. Not even close. No it doesn't. Combined with the full attack mechanic, it just discourages...