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As far as whether Pathfinder outsold D&D, here's what Lisa Stevens had to say in the Paizo blog a while ago. Take it with a grain of salt if you think she's got reason to lie about this: Now how much of that is due to Paizo going totally OGL with their rules is up in the air, but I'm betting...

That said, I think the OGL is a good thing overall and that there are reasons for WotC to consider using it or something like it. And if 5th edition is as similar to 3rd edition as the playtest material suggests, there isn't a lot of reason for them not to make use of it - especially if they...

Personally, I think one big reason WotC might want to avoid an OGL is that they don't know where the brand or the company is going to be in five years. The OGL served 3rd edition well, but the constant changeover in employees at WotC led to a shifting of design and business goals that helped...

I've got a two year old and another one on the way and am still gaming fine. I make sure to bring toys and activities for my son to keep him busy. It helps that he's interested in dice. We sometimes let him roll for an animal companion (he killed a zombie on a crit!), and when my wife is out of...

Comparing Golarion support with Forgotten Realms support isn't really indicative of how accessible each world is. One of the things about Golarion is that while there is a ton of lore for the setting, it's pretty canon light. It took five years to even establish a canon ending to the first...

I think I disagree (perhaps uneducatedly) with the premise of the original article. I don't necessarily think that gamers as a whole look for off-ramps. Their tastes do change, and some gamers do want to keep hopping from system to system, but I think a lot of people are content to settle into...

My guess is that the public playtest has been less about the rules and more about establishing a feel for the game. 4th edition, for any flaw it may have had, was probably the best balanced edition of the game. Where they seem to think they lost people is that they departed too much from the...

I'm not sure how accurate that is. Speaking for myself, I know that even if the next D&D edition fits my tastes better than Pathfinder, I'd probably still be a Paizo customer. Their adventures are usually very good, and their Monsters Revisited books are automatically must-buys for me and will...

Regarding criticisms of the "Green Lantern mask" guy: I think that's supposed to be Coran from the Baldur's Gate videogames, who did indeed have that mask tattoo for some reason.

I kinda see this criticism as akin to saying, "The hostile desert setting drives some people away from Dark Sun." I think the Realms is one of those settings where the mountains of lore are the big appeal. If you want a quasi-medieval fantasy setting without all that lore, there are many other...

Personally, I think purging the Realms of the powerful NPCs would actually hurt some of the charm of the setting. As a collection of maps and lore, I don't think the setting is all that special. The many conflicting personalities and the feel of the Realms as a living world is one of the things...

I personally liked providing my input. Going through the list, it seemed like wizard spells are great at 1st level, giving a lot of interesting choices. 3rd level is the "Heck yeah!" spell moment where you get fireball and lightning bolt. After 6th level, the spells become less interesting to...

I think WotC's best bet at solving this supposed problem lies not in rules but rather in the adventures they release. Sure, rules can be modified to tweak things a little, but it will be the first adventures released that set the culture of this edition of D&D. Lots of people will look to these...

I think it was mostly the culture of TSR at the time and not the actual rules that drew a lot of hatred. 2nd edition cleaned up a lot of things that had been confusing or counter-intuitive in 1st edition. It added more customization of characters in the form of specialty priests and thieves...

I know it would be blasphemous, but a lot of my general problems with skills in D&D could be fixed by taking Perception (or Listen/Search/Spot, or whatever) out and just making it an ability score. That's the one skill that always seems to come up no matter what style of game it is and which...

Haven't read it, but it's on my list now.

I decided years ago to just assume that the monster or NPC rolled a 10 for any opposed rolls in my games. My players tend to have bad enough luck with the dice - I didn't like seeing them roll a 16 only to have it negated because I rolled a 20. In the halfling example, sneaking past the kobolds...

They could always reconfigure the math so instead of adding a modifier you're adding the entire ability score. That way you get the 3-18 spread and the ability scores still mean something.

When I drew up the map for my campaign setting, I threw a mountain range on the west side of the map and decided that nobody in the known world knew what was on the other side. Scrying magic doesn't work beyond the range and teleportation magic can't get anybody past the mountains. The intention...

In my experience, folks dislike Elminster not because he's so powerful but because the published material for the Realms really shoves him in everybody's face. He began as a spokesperson for the Realms, but sometime during the 2nd edition era, he became pretty insufferable. Take a look at any...