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How so? In fact, that comment I made only has the truth I intended for it in the context of D&D itself. D&D settings are less "real" than even something like the continuity of a fictional world like Tolkien's Middle Earth or the Star Trek Universe. They are not a world so much as a suggestion...

I'll disagree with this. The balance should explicitly not change as you advance in levels. In other words, race and background should advance along with level and keep pace. I suppose I'm in favor of something like a 50-40-10, 50-30-20, or 40-40-20 split between Class, Race, and Theme. If the...

...why should something have happened? Nothing happened except exactly what you said: two different books gave inconsistent descriptions of a fictional setting. This inconsistency has no bearing on the setting of Mystara in an abstract sense, because Mystara doesn't even exist in that sense...

So are people who came into the game with 3E (like myself) who never played a previous editions of D&D, and don't care to, not "real" D&D fans? Are we having "badwrongfun" by playing a different style and having the game work for us? That's where this argument of yours is going. It's nothing...

I really dislike both the terms "mundane" and "super" in this context... It really does irritate me how people equate "not strictly realistic" with comic book superheroes (an association with all kinds of messy implications and assumptions that mischaracterize other's preferences). It also...

Honestly, I'd prefer to simply not specify the amount of time. Leave it abstract, or even variable from round to round. I actually prefer the idea that a character's actions in a round are more limited by the amount of energy it takes them to perform the action, rather than the amount of time it...

There is a pretty big difference between having success with your own custom races (which is always cool) and trying to create a system for making custom races. Basically, trying to systematize that sort of thing is where things go awry. Kind of like the monster creation rules in 3E that were...

My issue with that is "create your own X" rules tend to be pretty poor in games like this. They lack flavor and tend to push towards certain assumptions and options. They also tend to lack balance. How do you even build a good system for creating both elf subraces and dragons? It is unlikely to...

I want the Bard to be a pure musician in nature. The core aspect of their class should be musical, whether that is singing, playing an instrument, or dancing. If you ask me, the 4E Skald Bard presented in Heroes of the Feywild is the ideal. Its core class feature is the Skald's Aura, and pretty...

Lowering the cost of something is certainly an important way of making it more powerful, and this is indeed where too many previous bad implementations went awry. I really hope that any future version of this sort of thing completely sidesteps the Level Adjustment/Savage Species style of...

Certainly an interesting article. I don't usually think about the logo much... I rather like logos #5 and #7, myself. If they worked from there, they could get a pretty decent logo. They could probably adjust the placement of the ampersand or drop the dot in the O's, but they look pretty nice...

I must say, I don't usually use the multiquote option this much... Oh well, this is interesting. :) I'll disagree with the logic of your first point. The "it was weak before, so the concept is terrible" argument isn't a very convincing one. Simply improving the strength of the option would...

This is only true if you presume a 3E or 4E style race system and use Level Adjustment (a terrible mechanic) to balance anything more powerful than the pitifully weak baseline. There are a lot of other alternatives to that which make more powerful races more of an option, and I greatly prefer...

I don't really think so. Sure, this can get hard if every race were as humanlike as elves or dwarves, but good racial concepts are not. The gap between races only gets smaller if you create new race concepts within that gap. There are still a ton of race concepts that exist outside of the narrow...

I would hate the idea of random stat increases. That would be worse than random hitpoint increases, and it was a good thing when those were removed in 4E. I'm fine with gaining stats as you level up, though, especially in something like 5E, in which ability scores are looking to be more...

I suppose the core of this is that there are all kinds of encounter in D&D. Almost every one I've seen as a DM or player would treat fleeing as a loss of sorts. Fleeing is only a win if the battle has no stakes others than the continued survival of the PCs. That is fine for the random attack by...

Actually, that piece of art includes one of the things that annoys me the most about 4E art: messy armor designs that involve lots of oddly-shaped overlapping plates and a patchwork nature (like this character's leather boots rather than proper metal leg armor). This image is nowhere near as bad...

I've played druids, warlocks, warblades, psionic warriors, and wardens. Other than the strange coincidence that the classes I like include most of the ones with the "war-" prefix, I can't say there is some inherent playstyle similarity among them... Overall, I really don't like the idea of this...

"Game design" is sort of the big catch-all, and most of my core issues are not reflected by the overly vague options, so that's my pick. I feel kinda bad for going with the most generic possible option, though... If I could, I would say class design is the most important issues. In other words...

The problem with D&D is that it doesn't have many good ways to lose without a TPK. If the characters defeat all their enemies, but two characters die, it is still a win. Retreat is generally rather hard and can be a murky area in the rules. Capture is a possibility, but the rules as a whole tend...