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Having Thunder and Lightning as two effects is disappointing. Sonic damage types in general are kinda stupid for the fantasy genre imo. Drop Thunder and make Lightning into Electrical and you have a winning list!

Doesn't Wizards' own description of the class kind of preclude this idea? They specifically state Warlocks are those that use dangerous power sources, don't they? Good power sources wouldn't be dangerous. The closest I can come up with is someone who channels pure energy from the Positive...

Actually that statement makes no sense! Wizards are clearly good at "shooting people", so a Controller is not specifically poor offense. In fact, one of the ways it describes Controllers affecting the battlefield is through infliction of damage at range.

I like most of the examples you give, but I can't help but notice they are ALL from 1st edition. It makes me wonder what is different about the newer stuff. Do I only like those examples because of nostalgia? I do think one problem with newer monsters is that I feel like they are forcing too...

OK, whichever word you want to pick. The result is the same. His system mechanics were lousy (and while we could give him a pass for the era he wrote them in, he lost that benefit of the doubt with Lejendary Adventures or whatever it was called). But his choices for what things to include...

Well this is the part of D&D that is a toolkit imo. You don't have to use everything in the Monster Manual. I guess when it comes down to it, I am more interested in the writings of ancient Greeks than in those of R.A. Salvatore. I don't think anything these guys write for 4E will be...

Hm, I guess I never noticed the intelligence creep of Elementals. They are a little smarter in 3E than in 1E... I had never looked at their Int stat in the 3E Monster Manual, assuming they were still basically animalistic. Thanks for pointing that out. So hopefully, they'll still exist in...

And this is where I strongly feel D&D is in danger of going the wrong way. If there is one consistent thing you can say about D&D, it is that it's based on real myths and legends. Whether it be indirect use of Scandinavian legend by way of Tolkien, Greek myths, Arabian folklore, Asian animism...

You're mixing up a few things there. Nereids are part of the Greek scheme of nature spirits; not technically elemental. They are associated with bodies of water, not water itself. Genies are Arabian, of course. Although genies were sometimes associated with something we call an element (most...

Hey now! Bugbears go above Gnolls, not below them! ;) I actually think Bugbears are more interesting than Hobgoblins, personally. I think to differentiate them you play up the stealthy element and the animalistic appearance. Imagine being stalked by bear-men in the forest... they are the...

I also feel this way. The fluff writing is just more Warhammer and Warcraft to me. Basing things on ancient myths is cool. Basing things on bad fiction written by people who wouldn't be successful as authors is dull and irritating. Elementals were boring before? The concept of an elemental...

Well first, it's only "more formulae" because you're not used to it. It's actually the same amount of complexity exactly. Plus, your system is comparing bonuses to scores which gives weird effects like: Attacker with stat of 3 (bonus -4) vs defender with stat of 3 = 70% success Attacker with...

A lot of people are throwing out reasons for keeping the 3-18 scores. None of them make any sense. It's one thing to say they provide more granularity and there can be checks against the score rather than the bonus, but Dungeons & Dragons never does that! Since the game only ever uses the...

The only problem with this reasoning is that a game designed for a lot of classes will have classes that are more limited in scope. Thus if you exclude some classes from your game, you exclude characters with those ability sets. A game with fewer, broader classes would encompass more concepts...

Hi, welcome to the United States of America. We are the homeland of TSR and Wizards of the Coasts, publishers of Dungeons and Dragons, a game rooted in the mythology of our predominantly Western European heritage. ;)

Don't forget Three Hearts and Three Lions... actually I know this is listed in the 1E DMG bibliography but I can't remember if Moorcock is. There is a lot of what could or could not be that is unclear from this quote: Alignment: One major change to this system in 4 E is the fact characters can...

There is no reason this couldn't be applied to the bonus rather than the score. If it's like 3E with a 0 average, you are right. But of course, they have implied 0 will be the minimum and there will only be bonuses, in which case this would also work without using the scores. This would also...

As it happens, Half-Orcs are probably the one original race I have never seen someone tout as generic. So I'm not sure that is a good example. Gnomes as generic is a rare argument, but when used I would assume it's drawing more on the real world folklore of gnome than on a Tolkien reference to...

Not exactly... he said "It's not that 'anti-evil' crowd can't handle them properly, is that the 'omfg I'm so darq' crowd have the creativity of a grapefruit, think that a cape will piss off daddy, and are about as creepy as Count Chocula." Now if you feel that the 'omfg I'm so darq' subset of...

No, you're not seeing it. Bonuses are a linear representation of the stat as of 3E. Every 2 points in a stat = 1 point of bonus. Because that relationship is fixed, it becomes meaningless. Nothing in the game is rolled off the stat, only off the bonus. Only the bonus matters. With point...