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In my experience, you don't get the same mechanical effect. Aside from the blisteringly difficult prospect of quickly calculating a single die difficulty out of multiple checks at variable difficulty, each stage of the process is contingent on the results of the earlier one. The players will...

Well, suppose you do run a political, low-combat game. What advantage is gained by allowing players to eliminate their combat skills and double their noncombat skills? The end result will be a group of PCs with roughly identical levels of noncombat skill... which is exactly the same result as...

If an option exists such as allows a player to trade the great majority of their noncombat utiltiy for combat utility, or vice-versa, you destabilize the game automatically. There are certain inevitable consequences that come about from it, and you need a lot more communication and...

It might be, but I don't really think this sort of information needs to be in the core rulebooks at release. Any DM experienced enough to _want_ an old-school fragile PC experience is experienced enough to house rule it. Such as: PCs start with one-third HP, one-third healing surges, one-third...

I'd agree that it's less useful in 3.5 at higher levels, where there's such a big spread between untrained and specialized skills. But since 4e won't have that spread and since my PCs are still low-level, I'm not having any problems with it.

I can only speak to my own experience in using the system in my own 3.5-based game, but it's working splendidly. The PC tells me what they want to do, I tell them the skill to roll, they pick easy/medium/hard and roll it. If what they're trying to do is naturally Hard, then I just tell them that...

I'm definitely seeing the use of this class in my own game, and I can see a lot of players I know finding something to like about it. The distinction between "sword-swinging loner" and "leader of men" is one that gets made all the time. It's just that 3E PCs don't really have the option of...

I read it as an interrupt. There's not a whole lot of point in being able to cuff someone after they've already moved, and more importantly, it leaves the fighter with no "stick" to him. The way I read the ability combination it amounts to... A) If an adjacent enemy moves, get an OA before they...

Even presuming that planes with convenient temporal coefficients exist in 4e, I can hardly imagine that the process is any easier than teleporting- and teleporting has been clearly labeled as difficult, expensive, and much more cumbersome than in 3e. So sure, shift to the Demiplane of Plot Time...

My impression of what's been stated is that in the heroic tier, death generally means rolling up a new PC. Paragon PCs can get raised through major effort, and epic-tier sorts will view it as a speedbump. I suspect one reason death is so much less prevalent at low levels is because at heroic...

I would need to have two things to entertain such a technique for my own games. First, I would need to have a great deal of time to create all the details of something even so straightforward as a chase scene. Second, I would need to have a great deal of faith in my ability to anticipate the...

If there was a clear set of elements universally accepted as "authentic D&D", these sort of questions wouldn't exist. It's simply the case that different people point to different sacred cows. What's necessary herd culling to one is wholesale slaughter to another. I can see how some would find...

Personally, 4e feels a lot _more_ like OD&D than any recent editions have. OD&D characters didn't have a sheet full of abilities to whip out in varying situations. Fighting men could swing their swords, magic users could cast one of their comparative handful of spells... and that was about it...

I'd say the fewer-attackers-on-the-defender is as much a disadvantage as an advantage. You _want_ the monsters on the defender, because there's no kinder, gentler place they can be.

Yep. The Warlord will be a martial Leader class with abilities to provoke healing effects for the rest of the party. It's been stated that a martial-only group of ranger, fighter, rogue, and warlord should be able to handle encounters without major issues, and even then, their weak spot is...

In terms of the paladin, his mark is a supernatural ability. The reason the prior mark vanishes is because Tyr doesn't like to share the limelight with some fighter goon's taunts. It's a supernatural ability, so as far as we know a wizard did it. But suppose it's two fighters trading marks. Joe...

WotC appears to have simply decided that this is too good a quality for sneak attack to have- but even that's debatable, as Miko's post demonstrates that you can get sneak attack damage with at least one non-listed weapon. We'll need to see the actual rules to see whether you can spend a feat to...

Six bucks gets you a Rules Cyclopedia PDF off rpgnow.com. Other OD&D material has also been released there and at drivethrurpg.com. OD&D is available for anybody who wants to drop the price of a Happy Meal on it. OD&D was first. You might argue that the full flower of the game only appeared...

I think it worth recalling that a potion is one ounce of liquid. You don't have to "chug" anything to down one liquid ounce, and with the 1 hit point/hardness 1 state of most potion bottles, a reasonably strong PC can just toss the whole vial in his mouth and _bite_ it open. I don't think it'd...

It seems to me that a lot of those archetypes were never supported by the 3.5 PHB alone, either. You can't really make a white mage out of the PHB- a cleric shedding his armor is just plain gimping himself. There's nothing in there to specially tailor a swashbuckler, unless we suppose that the...