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A dragon breathing early and often is iconic. A malebranche forking people early and often is in the same vein. A monster who makes aggressive use of its keynote abilities, leavened with some uncertainty as to how often they can do it, is pretty much what a monster should be. PCs constantly...

I don't see recharge mechanics playing any role in 4e until designers get so played out that they start doing goofy stuff. It's a pretty basic optimization issue in that fast recharge turns any encounter power from "once per encounter" to "once per fast recharge interval", whatever that is. If...

But your bonus is based on your prime attribute- Dexterity. You'll be about 2 points shy of maximum if you don't take the feat, whereas if the feat-to-use-rapier-with-sneak-attack model applies, you spend one feat to use sneak attack with a shortbow. If you're trying to model Garrett, that's...

Garrett fought with a bow? I thought he used it chiefly as a utility tool and only tried to snipe people when he ran out of good options. And he was certainly never to be found at the rear, potting a dozen arrows into a melee scrum. No, Garrett just had his regular +Dex to hit with bows, which...

A 3.5 fighter who resolutely plowed everything into bow feats and Dexterity would become a light-armored, highly effective bow fighter that had no meaningful use for sword-and-board heavy armor fighting. In 4e, we write "ranger" instead of "fighter" in the class blank and produce the exact same...

A good immediate will depend on the balance of your group. If you've got a bunch of melee strikers, you can try something like "Spalling Ice: Missed melee attacks against the dragon's AC defense cause the attacker an immediate 1 or 2d6 cold damage from flying ice chips knocked loose by the...

4e is defining hit points as your current degree of script immunity, not physical wounds taken. The worst you suffer is action-hero injuries until you are dead. Healing surge triggers, whether from clerical healing words or warlord exhortations, simply represent you getting the gumption to keep...

We used scrolls and clay tablets for quite a while, too. They served their purpose. Bound codices just serve it better. I'm sure a lot of people dealt with dirt farmer PCs, though anecdotal evidence shows a lot of campaigns starting at 3rd level. It's just that starting at effectively 3rd level...

A single 6th level solo NPC will almost invariably kill a single 6th level PC. Given that 6th level PC parties are expected to encounter 6th level solo NPCs as not-unusual enemies, I think it safe to say that PCs will regularly encounter NPCs much more individually powerful than them, even if...

So if NPCs are supposed to be invariably weaker than PCs, who exactly are the PCs supposed to be fighting? And how do you explain that 5th level solo NPC that is strong enough to take on four or five same-leveled PCs at once, _alone_. No PC will ever be able to single-handedly challenge four...

Encounter abilities become once-every-five-minutes abilities out of an encounter, as far as I know. And given that the DMG promises guidelines for making traps and social situations into encounters, I can't see a lot of situations where you're not effectively limited in your use of these...

Do you know this, or do you think this? I don't recall Paizo or WotC passing around sales figures for their products. Attempting to extrapolate Paizo's market importance by what you see on hobbyist bulletin boards is a pastime one cut less useful than consulting sheep guts, because the sheep...

I'm not feeling this, myself. Compared to 3.5, I'm seeing more evenness among the classes. From the look of the Rogue class, you have one class primary attribute- Dexterity- and then a pick from one of two others- Strength or Charisma. That's two important stats. I'm fine with having each class...

I'm not sure the result they want is just a market for their game. I think the result they want is lots of money, a market for their game being a plausible route for this. We can argue whether or not their current tactics are going to get them there, but it can't be forgotten that the...

I'd agree that current free or one-time-fee tools can give the crude necessities for online play. I've never loved the tools I've tried, but they could get the job done. What DDI is selling isn't so much the tools as it is the community and the online rules access. You can mock up a VTT with a...

There's a 3.5 spell that lets you forcibly direct a large group of enemies around in an area? Or one that makes "Concentration" eat up more of your action, or become prohibitively difficult if it's too burdensome an effect? Or lets you ignore the brunt of an explosive effect and be pushed safely...

Setting aside the whole "we're already sure there's no way to remove a ward?" issue, this design space constraint isn't something I'm seeing. With keyword-based spell interactions, I can create entire new spell schools just by plugging a group of spells into the keyword system. For example, say...

Because it's implied that WotC's marketing research says that most players want more heroic 1st level PCs. Therefore, they engineer the game to make the minority playstyle the one that takes house-ruling, rather than forcing hypothetical new game buyers to manipulate rules they don't yet...

Given the known lack of the Monk class and the distinct likelihood that no special provenance will be made for unarmed combatants, here's how I intend to handle it until an actual monk class comes out: Feat: Unarmed Combatant Benefits: Pick a one-handed weapon. Your unarmed attacks count as...

In terms of balance, I think it's also worth remembering that nobody's going to get kicked from a D&D party for having an unoptimized character build. A druid filling in as an X may not be as good as a "pure" X, but precious few adventuring groups are going to be spending days calculating...