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Hollywood movies have become increasingly bland and insipid as they shoot for global success. This is because different ethnic groups don't like the same things, have the same sense of humor, relate to history the same way, and so on. You end up sanding off all the details to try and...

When I was a kid, some poor woman got completely lost in our neighborhood, saw us playing with a bunch of other kids, and asked if we knew where some street was. We didn't, and she drove on. The neighborhood gossip, a woman who was always upset about some imminent doom or another, lived across...

I guess you missed the part where I talked about customer satisfaction. Generally speaking, "this is falling apart," is not something that increases customer satisfaction. We don't look at merely "Did somebody buy this? Yes or no? Oh look, somebody bought it! Yay! Quality!" We look at whether...

A UI isn't a product, and ease-of-use isn't just UI. For example, whenever a game makes the jump from PC to console, the old fans inevitably are unhappy that the new game has lost depth and features in order to be easily controlled with a 10-button controller. There's a tradeoff between making a...

There can be factors in quality that are somewhat mutually exclusive, although maybe Oofta's steak example isn't the best-chosen analogy. For example, in software, people like "more features" and "easy to use." The same user will typically tell you that they like both. At some point...

The consumer is the final judge of quality, and businesses pursue quality in order to get sales. You can win all kinds of industry quality awards and get rave reviews from critics, but ultimately, the consumer is looking at a whole bunch of different things, and what's really annoying is that...

I think it's hard to really understand how different a system can be without ever interacting with truly different systems. B/X vs 5e vs 3.5 vs AD&D vs Pathfinder is like arguing over which full-sized pickup truck with which options package is the best, or which fast-food place has the best...

Man, Cracker Barrel is perfect. Toys for the kiddies. Rocking chairs for the grognards. Biscuits n gravy for everyone else.

This thread is like the Cheesecake Factory. It may not have the best arguments in it, but no matter what you want to argue about in it, the arguments going on are at least good enough to satisfy a wide variety of people.

America wouldn't be America without a religious panic every generation or so.

There's no reason to believe, given the gonzo sales numbers of 5e, that the average player even has a second favorite edition. "Everyone's second favorite edition" seems to have been coined by forum dwellers who, being some of the hobby's most dedicated fans, have rather different preferences...

Have you seen the early playtest packets? Huge changes were made in response to feedback. One Mearls mentioned at least once was the Champion subclass. He thought nobody would want a simple roll-n-kill Fighter, but requests for one were overwhelming.

After being buried under a sheet of ice in a once-in-a-century snow storm, I would kill for a cheeseburger.

If I were to develop this fully, I'd write spells akin to spell smites to do something along those lines, and have said so several times. People are reacting to something I wrote in 5 minutes like it's a release product in a $50 book. Of course it's incomplete, I didn't spend any time on it. I...

You can do that pretty easily with what I wrote. 1. Highlight the whole thing 2. Hit CTRL-C on your keyboard 3. Go to your favorite text editor 4. Hit CTRL-V 5. Change whatever you don't like to what you like EK is able to choose exactly 4 spells from the full wizard spell list. The big...

Personally, I want to play D&D. Somebody else might want something quite different.

I'm not trying to make a generic gish class; I'm trying to somewhat translate 4e's Swordmage to 5e. Swordmage is a defender class in 4e (i.e. it's a hard-to-kill melee class). Also, while paladins and barbarians can technically use longbows, javelins, and handaxes, their signature class...

Oh, absolutely. A system such as I described would not be very good at "Epic Hero Wading Through the Goblin Hordes." My point is simply that system very much influences what sort of stories emerge from the games you run. D&D doesn't do so hot at particular sorts of stories, but systems designed...

"The Commoner has held a grudge against you since you accidentally trampled his beloved cat with your horse while riding through town. Yes, you're 20th level, but owing to the situation, he gets 40 attacks during the first round." I mean, you could. I think if you wanted to handle Achilles...

Well, it's literally called "swordmage," and where are you getting "unarmored" from? I gave it both light & medium armor, and an INT bonus to AC. It's not a 1/2 arcane caster if it doesn't have access to the arcane spell list. EK is a great subclass. It works just fine if you choose the right...