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As I see it, a PC caught asleep by an assassin isn't going to get his throat cut unless critical-hit damage is enough to kill him outright. Hit points are much more emphatically "plot armor" in 4e. An assassin who does 30 points of damage in coup de grace punishment to a PC that has 31 hit...

According to the Keep on the Shadowfells writeup, whenever you inflict forced movement on a target, you can inflict fewer or no squares of movement at your discretion.

It is a perfectly valid world-building choice to decide that's the case, and let PCs undercut the market. The DM will then have to decide where the market stabilizes, somewhere between salvage cost and creation cost, and he'll have to deal with the fallout of PCs being able to acquire optimized...

Perversely enough, we already have a real-world example of the exact truthfulness of the default. WoW has demonstrated that the minimal sale price of a disenchantable object is the sale price of the remnants it disenchants into, and that's in a market with no barrier to entry whatsoever and...

And here, you automatically win your point. I believe it is completely and utterly predictable for a lord to forbid the magic item trade within his city without extortionate taxes. You find such taxes totally implausible. When you get to decide how your world operates, I'm not going to be able...

I mean that if you say a 50% profit is good for a magic item merchant, and thus you should get 5,000 gold for selling a 10K-creation-cost sword, then you're assuming that the merchant is dead certain he can sell that sword for 10K without paying anything out of pocket. Once you subtract luxury...

You write as if the merchant was certain to find a buyer for the item at 5,000 gold and that finding this buyer was free. Furthermore, you presume that the merchant runs no risk of theft, swindling, or confiscation by kings. I think you presuming too much for a default D&D world. What do you...

If a DM wants to call a 20% resale on magic items, he can justify it easily. Taxes, a market that has no communication method more sophisticated than hand-carried messages plus maybe a little magic, and the fact that buyers with cash don't feel like getting fleeced on fake goods amply explain...

Barring text to the contrary, I'd say it stays asleep until it makes the save. It's not like normal stimuli are sufficient to wake somebody up- the spell makes people fall asleep in the middle of a raging combat, and you can't wake your partner up just by screaming at him. Stabbing him might be...

Because without the ability requirement, multiclass feats are just Better than a Skill Training feat in a covered class skill. Also, if you don't have at least a +1 in your multiclass' prime attribute, you'll be fairly terrible with its powers. And finally, a significant stat investment means...

There's a reason the city's ruler tolerates powerful magical objects being sold to just anyone inside his walls? Items that are useless for mundane pursuits but ideally designed for murderously violent types who break through magical defenses to kill powerful people and take their stuff? I'd...

Traveling merchants exceed heroic-tier PCs the way a lot of important NPCs exceed heroic-tier PCs. Some by a little, some by a lot, and some not at all. It requires no strain whatsoever to imagine One-Eyed Holger, the leathery trader whose heavily-armed caravan has been running the salvage...

I'd agree that it's theoretically possible to have every single combat in a campaign provide valuable non-fighting-related activities for those who are combat-incapable. But that doesn't necessarily make it a good idea to build that necessity into the rules. If you allow combat-incompetents...

You throw the dagger and hamstring it, causing it to topple back in the direction you want. Every time you hit it for the rest of the encounter, you're aggravating that injury and causing it to stumble in the correct direction. Or if you're a brute-type rogue? Then yeah. You hit that thing so...

Not for rogues, archery rangers, wizards, or warlocks, unless they've got shield proficiencies I haven't noticed. If you don't have shield proficiency, then adding some intrinsic benefit to dual-wielding makes it a no-brainer choice for a class to wield two weapons.

Given that 4e normalizes equal-level enemies at about 50% chance of hitting for any given swing, it will always be better unless you're swinging at an enemy you have a low chance of hitting normally. Here's the table you use to decide, if it's -4 to each dual-attack roll: Roll Needed 16+ 25%...

Two attacks at a penalty as a basic attack screws with the hit math. It gives fighters de-facto two-weapon combat skills, since their basic attack is very good, being Strength-based, and makes two-weapon combat much more attractive for ensuring hits- and the ensuing marking- than any...

Fighter with cleric splash: a defender with 1/day healing word. Paladin: a defender with 3/day lay on hands and one fewer feat spent. Sure, you can burn another three feats on swapping out three of your fighter powers for cleric ones, but that costs you 2/3rds of your heroic-tier feats to get...

One of the things I like best about 4e's new class design model is that it's so remarkably easy to reflavor. Simply by shuffling the fluff around in a class, I can turn out a huge range of concepts while still being confident that the combat balance is right. As something of a thought...

This may well be the case, but why? You'll be a greatsword-wielding, sneak-attacking Rogue who'll fit perfectly with what you've described. You'll just be rolling (perhaps) 1d6 base damage instead of (maybe) 2d6. Does that extra 1d6 seem irresistably good to you? Well, that may be the reason why...