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We haven't had any players die in the playtests, thank goodness. Otherwise, we'd have all sorts of lawsuits on our hands. More seriously, characters have died in playtests. I've killed a few myself. However, the playtests that are posted are from peoples' home games. If characters aren't dying...

You know, I really have to do a better job of editing my blog entries. I wince every time I see my horrid grammar and grade school spelling quoted on a message board.

The key is that, in most cases, magic items give more options, rather than improvements to existing options. Strictly speaking, the fighter with no items is less powerful than the fighter with a ton of items, yet if the campaign tends toward few or no items, the game still functions fine. For...

Yup, that's pretty much the intent. We went out of our way to embrace transparency in the rules, to better help DMs understand how magic items interact with PCs, how they interact with the system math, and what happens when you start to change things. It's also why items have a level as a guide...

Yeah, I see the world pre-cataclysm as a 3e world. That definitely played a role. I also wanted a campaign setting that would support lots of epic, paragon, and heroic tier adventures. A lot of the secrets are things you can uncover at heroic tier and that point you in the direction of a story...

;) Sorry, been too busy to check the boards lately. In a nutshell: the gods of humanity are a little miffed that mortals have started using forms of magic other than divine. They band together and back a theocracy that tries to conquer the entire world. An alliance of wizards, led by an...

This is what I'm doing, after a few false starts: http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/dnd/dungeoncraft/ I've started with Ray Winninger's first Dungeoncraft article, and going through one or two a week to slowly build a campaign world from scratch. It's been a lot of fun. Even as an experienced...

We talked a lot about using an existing town, but a couple of things came up: 1. When we do classic stuff, we want to do it right. It'd be a bit of a bummer if you got the Keep, but none of the Borderlands, so to speak. With space an issue, we didn't want to deliver what felt like only half an...

The drow poison is really techy, but that is intentional. The drider (and the drow I designed to go with it) all used the same poison mechanic. Their poisons stacked with each other. It would be crazy to run every poison this way, but in play it was a lot of fun for my group. With the drow...

There's a riddle in H1. Also, there's a secret room that you can find only by piecing together a few clues (or seriously dumb luck/thoroughness). No skill checks, just good, old fashioned brain processing power.

This is what I get for confiding in cartoon characters. I can only pray that Jabberjaw takes the secrets of 4e he carries to the grave.

This is actually something we talked about at the office on Friday. In some games, it makes tons of sense for monsters/opponents to use the same exact rules as PCs. In Mutants & Masterminds or Champions, the only difference between a hero and a villain is that the villain is a bad guy...

A few points: 1. The divide between monsters and PCs isn't as big as everyone thinks. Monsters have the same ability scores as they do in 3e, skills, any feats that are appropriate, and so on. This won't be 2e or 1e. 2. Though monsters don't necessarily use spell-like abilities, monster...

Let me assure everyone that, if the fighter in the example actually did do 500 hit points of damage in one attack, development will ambush him on his way out of design and soundly beat his damage back to a real D&D level. (The example combat cannot possibly start on round 1. It's more likely...

D&D doesn't need to become more like other games. D&D needs to become more like D&D. Up thread, someone talked about getting people into AD&D even though they pester him to run 3e. I think there's something inherently fun, interesting, and humanizing to RPGs that makes them appealing across...

I posted to Ryan's blog, but I might as well post here. I don't think the solution to the problem of "DMing is too hard" is necessarily "Distribute the work amongst the entire group." A more elegant solution might be, "Make it less work to DM." There's no magic, minimum burden of work...

I believe it does. Heroscape minis are a bit larger than "heroic scale" 28mm, and I think that makes them about the same size or slightly larger than standard BattleTech hex.

I wonder if gaming companies are simply looking for more diversity in their cons? I hear a lot about RPG companies hitting comic cons, DragonCon, stuff like that. Origins might be caught in a bit of a squeeze. That said, I've always enjoyed Origins. I'd love to go again.

FWIW, I'm on the design team and I pretty much find WoW as fun and interesting as banging my head against a brick wall.

I can personally assure you that, due to my diligent efforts as a playtester, effemminate Duros fops will be fully supported by the campaign. You have my pledge!