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Apples and oranges. A traditional dragon is scary as hell in a low-magic setting, and just a big boring lizard in a high-magic one where most of the characters have superhuman abilities and throw spells around at will. (and might very well have been fighting dragons since level 5) Also, a...

If you wanted to be able to safely cross the areas involved, you'd have to IIRC be level 20-something. But there really isn't any point in waiting - you can get over to the other starting areas even at level 1 - you'll just die a lot. IIRC in order to get from the Night Elf area to the Gnome...

Sorry, but you strike me as the one in denial here, not Starman. The original Indy movies, while filled with impossible action movie moments, were at no point as over the top as Crystal Skull. It's a matter of scale and degree - jumping out of an airplane in a life raft, surviving a trip on...

Jake Norwood, who wrote the Riddle of Steel RPG, was actually trying to make melee combat feel similar to what you'd find in Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher novels - and I think he succeeded. Unfortunately, this makes combat so lethal it's really not suited to playing a D&D style game. Though...

Quite aside from whether it makes the game feel MMO like, the "tank" classes were basically the worst idea anyone ever had in the history of MMORPGs, and it took ages for designers to catch on and finally do something about it. (And it still hasn't been enough - the whole tank/dps/crowd...

No, it isn't. Vlad comes off (at least initially) as almost ignorant of other types of magic because of the comparison with Morrolan and Aliera, but he's actually decent at "normal" sorcery, is able to dabble in "elder" sorcery (which he can do only because he's one of the founders of the...

It was loosely based on heavily house-ruled D&D? If anything, that proves my point. Though I'd like to see an actual quote from Brust on the subject - just because tons of fantasy authors used to play D&D and might have brought some ideas back and forth between the game their writing does not...

Not really. The main characters of the Jhereg series are exceptionally ill-suited to being portrayed as 4E characters. Though to be fair, D&D in general is just not a good match for the kind of fantasy Brust writes.

Here's another fun thing to think about... Since you basically add 1/2 character level to everything, a 10th level Wizard is going to have a higher bonus on Strength checks and Strength-based skills used untrained than most 1st level Fighters. 10(+5) Strength vs. 18(+4) Strength.

I think it's a stretch to assume that all 4 encounter powers will be useful in any given encounter. They'd have to be pretty generic for that to be the case.

Thanks, that's very helpful. I don't know that it's the take on it I'd use myself, and like a lot of people I'm sort of sceptical when it comes to Sage rulings (too many clearly wrong ones over the years) but it's good to have at least some idea of what the people behind it might have intended.

The title says it all. Which spells does Protection from Evil automatically suppress? From the SRD: "Second, the barrier blocks any attempt to possess the warded creature (by a magic jar attack, for example) or to exercise mental control over the creature (including enchantment (charm) effects...

I've played a couple of 4E demos, and despite the first-hand experience I still think the classes feel very smilar. I even played a 1st level 3.5 dungeon crawl just days afterwards, and if anything, it only confirmed my opinion of 4E. (it certainly didn't make the 4E feel more varied and...

I disagree with the general tenor of the advice so far. Unless the effect is simply not visible to the naked eye or impossible to predict given the circumstances, give the players as much information on what the enemies are doing and how it affects the combat and the environment as possible -...

The great majority of characters I've played never "retired" - usually, the game would end because of RL reasons, and the character would just sort of stay frozen in time forever. The second biggest subset would be the prematurely dead ones... There's really only one I can think of that...

I think you'll see this is not a problem once we get more information on Rituals.

Debatable at best (both in RL and D&D) but - more importantly - since when is anything with an animal intelligence smart enough to figure out that cutting a rope will make their opponent fall and die? (never mind picking out several specific ropes of a bridge)

And if a d20 company other than WotC announced something like 4E, a good portion of the same people who are already calling 4E the best D&D ever would probably have called it a piece of crap. Anyway, while you're likely right about the potential amount of complaining, you're missing a key point...

I want to see what the DMG has to say on the subject of players failing to achieve their epic destinies. Very little, I suspect... since in 4E, everything that's not "fun" is being removed. It's not that most D&D games I played in actually had a serious threat of failure - everyone knew that...

Huh? Between Improved Trip, Enlarge Person and Bull's Strength, you get all of +14 to your trip attempt. You'd need an unaugmented Str of 26 (since you're already getting enhancement and size bonuses to Str) on top of that to even equal something like a dire bear. (which has +10 str, +8 size and...