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For me, balancing feels forced (or contrived) the moment that micro-balanced rules have superseded the story I'd enjoy organically. For example, I don't have a problem with a keen-eyed clever rogue who can sneak attack a zombie by knowing to blast its brains out. But I do have a problem if...

Not that you mention it, I think you should simply be able to walk through a fire elemental (vs a magma elemental or suchlike) albeit get burned badly. Likewise, a fire elemental could just try to overrun foes like a wildfire, burning everything inside it.

Peace between fire elementals? My current pet peeve is the Foe to Frog in Heroes of Feywild. Like most of the book, the fluff is so amazingly compelling, and the mechanics are so uninspiring: A billowing cloud of green fog surrounds your foe. When the fog dissipitates, your enemy is gone, and...

On the new horizons thread, someone asked why fire elementals aren't impervious to fire in 4E -- which I'd agree with, you don't fight pure fire with pure fire because you're just adding to the fire. Conversely, however, if fire elementals are invulnerable to fire, then they can't hurt each...

On one hand, I think that when a 20th level fighter is facing off against a 10th level fighter, the sense of advancement is felt mainly with hit points and sword mastery. As long as the 20th level fighter has a sword proficiency or Sword Master Trait or whatever that provides the extra edge, it...

But regarding scaling, say the guard has +1 to archery and the legendary archer has +5 to archery. It's clearly unsimulationist if the legendary archer only nets a +4 to win an archery contest. However, I would be happy to view the +5 vs +1 as a difference in ranks rather than a net difference...

That's not the point though. The point is that the philosophy that allows you to assume that the in-game world scales in parallel with heroic progression so blatantly is specific to one kind of playstyle (situational based I think it's called vs exploratory) and thus IMO antithetical to a...

But if you have a regular archer and a legendary archer side by side in an marathon archery contest and both are shooting arrows for several hours at a target, then the legendary archer surely is shooting closer to bullseye.

I'm curious about this too, not sure if I missed something.

For me, that changes the entire flavor supporting the concept of Vancian casting. As I remember, the wizard is memorizing and imprinting magical runes in his mind's eye, so that the magic is immediately available at need. The wizard gets x spells between memorizations because there's only so...

I'm not aware how these Power books do it, but I think that from a purely practical POV, that rebuilding or rectonning your PC from Basic to Advanced build would be a nice option for newbies. That way, your kid or the new guy can try a few levels of Basic gameplay and then switch to Advanced...

Another theory: Female dragonboobs might be a trait that is analagous and not homologous to mammaries. I remembered an interesting theory in university, confirmed on Wikipedia: So with female dragonborn, chest mounds may have evolved purely as sexual signals, like ridiculously large antlers on...

The female dragonborn have fooled everyone. See, they don't actually have breasts. Decades ago, when dragonborn first came into contact with human civilization, many female dragonborn became annoyed that everyone was calling them "Mister". Other female dragonborn felt like outcasts and wanted to...

Ya, "core" means different things for newbies vs current players. "Base" or "baseline" would seem to be the most accurate. More flowery is "essentials" but that's been taken. Other synonyms are "foundations" or "origins". I don't care either way but playtests might reveal a preference. For...

In the story, if you have a Basic Fighter and an Advanced Fighter, does that mean: a) Basic fighter is trained differently and less specialized than an Advanced fighter b) Basic fighter is using a conventional/defensive stance, and Advanced fighter is being more aggressive and risky c) Two...

If D&D can be split along the threefold model to be modular for playstyles, then I'm all for it. OTOH, apparently, there's some contention over whether games are actually split along GNS lines or rather according to this: Breakdown of RPG Players Yes, one guy gave me a hard time with the...

That's funny, I had the opposite naming scheme, a month or so ago, I called "D&D Legends" the 4.75E (because 4E is about very high legendary fantasy) and "D&D Lore" as the evolution of "classic"/3E low/traditional simulationist fantasy.

Say previous editions are no longer published (and old stock collects dust on the shelves in the corner of the local gaming store) or sold only as PDFs or thru DDI online. In that case, for D&D newbies, a new "Dungeons & Dragons" doesn't need a qualifier (in fact a qualifier may just confuse, if...

[falls to knees, hands raised to the sky, camera zooms out] NOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!!!!! What do you mean?

Sure but I think the original concern was: what do you do when the DM and players all want to use different modules? A lot of people say 'the gaming group should decide' as if each group was a hivemind and the major divisions are between my group and your group, which maybe true but I think that...