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That's the approach I take. How mercenaries are treated depends on the locale. If they're in a community firmly under the control of a powerful lord, they better have a seal or letter from someone explaining their fealty. Or they have to surrender their arms at the gate. If they're in a...

How about the DMs? Pathfinder has a reputation as a game that a lot of DMs run grudgingly. 5E is easier to run than Pathfinder, and more appealing to many Pathfinder players than 4E. If the DMs switch, the players will follow suit. I'm curious what these traditional classes are and how they've...

I really hope 5E adventures are not all written with the organized play in mind. Organized play operates under fundamentally different assumptions as regular home play. I love the 5E system and intend to use it going forward. But if this (and Dragonspear Castle) are to be the norm for 5E...

If you're doing dungeon crawls mostly, where you typically have 5-9 combats a session, minis and a grid would really slow down play. If there was a particularly complex situation, we'd put minis and dice and bottle caps on the table and sketch out the borders of the room, but that's about it...

In the case of my group, me and one guy got into the game with Holmes basic (before B/X was released) and then a year or two later some guys who had bought the Moldvay Basic set joined up group. But since we (the 'experienced' guys) already had the AD&D books by then, we saw no need for the...

You only have to look at how Essentials differed from initial 4E to see where WotC thought they'd put their foot wrong, and how quickly they realized they had to address the error: Essentials is easier to get into than initial 4E, with simpler classes Essentials classes are more familiar to...

D&D isn't a rulebook. I know people who have played for 30 years without ever cracking one. D&D is a shared game experience that you can't extrapolate from an inert text. May as well assume you know how people drive in California by reading the California Highway Regulations. Was Gygax one of...

Regardless of what the rules say, a great many people (in my experience most) played TSR D&D theatre of the mind. You know that's the way Gygax himself played, right? And that none of the examples of play in any of the books mention grids? We weren't houseruling or settling for playing without...

Character generation is far more streamlined in 5E than in 3.x. or 4E. No lists of powers of feats to parse. No skill points to spend. Pick a race, class, sub-class (skip if playing basic), and background. Done. I'd call that an improvement in terms of making it more accessible to new and...

Makes sense to me. But there's an RPG forum meme out there that people don't really play D&D because they like it, but because they don't know any better, or they're hidebound, or they have no choice because it's so popular. I feel bad for people who have always disliked D&D but felt they had no...

You've had a couple people who are editors or technical writers already explain to you the cost-benefit of proofing. I love how people who don't really know anything about an industry think they know better than the people who work in it for a living. I really doubt there are zero. And I'm...

My experience exactly. And you didn't even go into the headache of reactions and interrupts in combat. We have 10 sessions of Essentials under our belts and I'm still hand-holding a couple players through every combat.

It's a game book. There are medical and industrial manuals whose accuracy have lives (and lawsuits) depending on them. Errors still get through.

And let's not forget that you don't reach blockbuster status without a lot of women in the seats. And that typically means relationships need to play a big part in the movie. It was young women who made Spider-Man a blockbuster.

Have you ever edited or proofed a large document? The original author goes over the doc. Then a subject matter expert or editor will go over the doc again. Then one or more proofers will go over the doc yet again. And yet there are always errors. And that's isn't confined to the RPG industry...

To players who don't enjoy reading about D&D for its own sake, what happens at the table is the game. If they don't experience something playing at the table, then it's not a problem. And there are a lot more reasons for stopping around 10th level than imbalance. PC death, TPKs, keeping a group...

Random, unexpected challenges of varying danger are a feature for some people, not a bug. And it's simplicity itself to ignore them. I disagree. Every edition of D&D attracts a large number of new gamers. Players relentlessly attrit out of the hobby, and new ones take their place. WotC recently...

This. In general, I've seen little correlation between what people fixate over on RPG forums and what people care about playing the game in real life. Granted, my experience is limited to 30-40 players in 7-8 groups over 35 years. When people say they haven't had a problem with imbalance in the...

Every published book - RPG or otherwise - has errors. You can't fix that. Best you can do it mitigate against errors with more time and resources allocated to editing and proofing. Then imagine how much more errata there would be if they released all three books at once.

Or maybe class imbalance is something most players don't notice or care about. Subjects of interest to system wonks on RPG forums don't necessarily correlate to the subjects of interest to the much wider group of fans (especially large for D&D) who don't participate in forums. Is there...