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I think I'll just reply to both of these at the same time. You both make a few similar points, and it would be easier to say the same thing to both of you. First, SkyOdin already did a good job of replying to the idea that simplicity and good game are somehow at odds. In fact, they are not. A...

You know, as a 4E fan the last thing I want to see is a 4E clone. Clones of any kind are the last thing I want to see as a new game. I have very little respect for the people who try to profit off of them (unless they change the game around so much it becomes a totally new game, but then it...

Implying that 4E fans want a "tactical miniatures game" and are not really interested in a "roleplaying" game is not going to help this discussion at all. Regardless, you're wrong. 4E is an RPG, and 4E fans want an RPG. Anything else is just you deluding yourself or trying to dismiss the...

I wouldn't agree that 4E is bad for solo campaigns at all... I've both run and played in 4E solo campaigns, and it works just fine. The system's coherent math and easily scaled encounters makes it work very well for unusual campaigns. The game is simply more predictable in every way than other...

People who don't play 4E tend to forget that it didn't have spell resistance partially because there was no mechanics to build spell resistance upon. Namely, 4e didn't have any mechanical divide whatsoever between "magic" and "non-magic". It didn't use any of the...

This really sums up the problem quite well. Thank you very much for going to all this effort to make this post and sum up our feelings. All the 5E news so far really has been disheartening. I was honestly looking forward to a new edition, but the fact that 5E is looking to be incredibly...

This actually isn't true. There are plenty of things in D&D that are much, much better than doing damage, especially if we are talking about 3E. Pretty much the entire realm of save or suck and save or die effects are much better than damage. The same thing goes for abilities that can completely...

You know, I'm honestly appalled that the opening post started by describing a "complex" fighter as a fighter who has access to trip and disarm of all things, and then went on to say that these things are bad for the fighter to have. This is absurd! There are three genuine complex fighters in...

I do question the logic of this line of thinking... If the DM is occupied with adjudicating rules, it just takes time and energy away from creating interesting situations and improving the quality of the story. What's more putting more power in the DM's hands isn't really an ideal state. If you...

You're missing the point. Games don't choose whether they have an implied setting or not, they just choose what that implied setting is (unless the game was designed badly, in which case the implied setting exists without thought and probably hurts the tone of the game). For example, Chess has...

This really isn't true, though. The fluff bits for the powers in 4E can be removed, but the way the flavor comes through the mechanics themselves will still remain. Even if you completely reskin kobolds into a unit of guerillas fighting in the Revolutionary War, the Shifty ability remains, and...

I'd probably be considered a weird casual gamer, but I still consider myself closer to being a casual D&D player than a truly dedicated one. Honestly, I play videogames and freeform roleplay/improv stuff much more than I play D&D, so I'd consider D&D to be a tertiary hobby for me at best. I also...

You should be. If the Cleric can expend all of his daily resources to be roughly as good as the Fighter, then the classes are horribly, horribly imbalanced. The difference is versatility and flexibility. At present, a Cleric can choose to be almost anything, but the Fighter can only choose to...

As far as I'm concerned, the fact that the Fighter isn't clearly and unquestionably miles ahead of other classes in raw power is gigantic red flag, considering that the Fighter has a severe lack of options compared to other classes. A few mild bonuses are nowhere near enough to make up for the...

I definitely agree that rolling for hitpoints is a bad idea. It has all kinds of drawbacks, and almost no advantages. If nothing else, rolling for hitpoints makes auditing your character sheet to double-check for errors much more of a hassle than it should be. You need to write down what you...

Well... yeah. I think I just said as much. That's one of the things I like about 4E, or the 3E Tome of Battle, as another example.

These are all fair points, but there are two major alternatives that you don't mention that let you balance the game without those kinds of restrictions. First, one possibility for balancing magic to magic is to simply scale back the idea of what magic can do. If, for example, a wizard's most...

To be honest, this isn't true at all. I'm a 4E fan who doesn't feel this way, and there are many other people I've seen who don't feel that way either. Frankly, a lot of the language used by the 5E team in blog posts and such has made many 4E fans very skeptical and nervous about the game (what...

It is certainly true that D&D is just a game. It is a collection of rules, designed to provide a group of people with an entertaining evening. D&D is a game, just as Pathfinder is a game, Chess is a game, and World of Warcraft is a game. They're all just games. Whether or not they are...

They continue to realize my worst fears... A laser focus on a "core game" built for the fighter/wizard/cleric/rogue team with only humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings as the races is a terrible way to go about the designing the game and building it to leave room for more race and class...