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Sorry for not being clear. I meant that against creatures without DR, PA is often not as useful as it appears to be, because the extra 10 damage on a hit are nice and obvious but the attack missing because of PA is not so obvious.

Good points. I wanted to add one more argument for killing of the dragon: The DI wanted to use the Brand Names. Calling their online magazine "Dragon" or "Dungeon" was probably impossible as long as Paizo had the license to that name. And given that these brand names have been around for a long...

Anything that gives you extra attacks at full attack bonus makes PA better (e.g. haste). However, without actually tracking how often you hit or miss because of PA and how much damage you actually do, it is next to impossible to intuitively assess if PAing is good for you.

That is pretty much what I said. Barring DR, power attacking is usefull, if your first attack hits on a 2 even after you subtract the penalty for PAing. However, high level fighters often have an attack bonus that is higher than the AC they are trying to hit. In this case, moving and PAing is a...

If you do the math, power attacking on a full attack usually reduces the expected damage output, except when you fight creatures with DR. However, at high levels, power attacks allow fighters to do a lot of damage on a standard attack.

Same here; For me KotB was always the prime example how to not write an adventure. Furthermore it is frequently used to deride D&D in general as a stroryless hackfest. If at all, Mike is too kind.

MM IV is starting to approach MM I in frequency of use. I used Creatures of Rogukan for a while, although that book had some CR issues.

Also Pinnacle Press is a bad example, because they had used a non-d20 system before and only jumped on the d20 bandwagon to make some extra money, All their d20 offerings were rather lackluster. So if your designers don't like d20 you're better off with a different system.

Sorcerrors are for Monsters My theory is that Sorcerrors were originally developped as a monster spellcasting class. They are easier to GM, you don't have to explain the lack of a spellbook, and they are actually not quite as nasty as wizards in a single encounter.

Unbalanced game situations destroy fun.

I think your comparison is somewhat flawed. While it will always be easy to intentionally break an RPG, we are not really concerned about those extreme builts. It is much more problematic when characters just end up being much better than others, if the game gets broken by accident. If you play...

:) ;)

Fair enough, though I am not sure if the often lamented sense of player entitlemant is a result of WOTC marketing books to players or D&D's focus on game balance. Nevertheless, would you agree that game balance is a (one of several) design goals when building an RPG?

You may want to change your sig, if you are concerned about edition wars.

We clearly do, as you have just give a very concise definition of powergaming (my version) :-) I still think, that you can unintentionally break the game, even if you're building your character with the sole intention of making the game fun. If certain concepts are plainly more powerful than...

You misunderstood. Those games were a lot of fun. You see I played an Elf in oD&D. They were less fun for the fighter though. And today I wouldn't ever want to play in this munchkin, monty haul, kill everything games again. There was no story and no point. they were fun back then, but my tastes...

You bring up a good point. However, compared to more important issues like the flair of a PrC, balance is reasonably objective an easy to measure, so it can be discussed better. Thus it will be discussed more. I'm not sure that this is necessarily an indicator of importance.

And after 10 or more years on the game, I'm sure you developed your personal set of crutches that works for you and some of the ppl you play with. And given the emotional investment you have in your personal crutches, you surely think they work better than crutches made by anybody else...

No, it wasn't as much fun at least not initially. It was fun, because after learning all the bad mistakes in the game design, each of us developed methods to cope. The strenght of RPGs is that with some enthusiasm and experience you can make any game work. And I clearly remember a long...

But wouldn't even those player be better off with a balanced set of rules? A feature that I don't use much is still a feature.