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c) The poison wears off in 12-30 seconds, probably dealing less than a healing surge worth of damage. By the next day, the poison will be long forgotten. If you want to handwave that NPCs somehow die from poison, that's fine. But don't expect PCs to be intimidated by it unless it actually...

What with the rather apathetic performance of the Knock ritual, I was faced with the question: "Well, how long would it take just to smash down the door instead? Less than 10 minutes?". The answer to which was a resounding yes - not only does it not take 10 minutes, it usually won't take...

I was looking at the skills section, and I noticed something - while taking 10 is mentioned, taking 20 isn't. I find this an odd omission, because the whole point of having a rule for taking 20 is to streamline things and keep the game going - which 4E claims as a primary design goal. They...

That was my point - neither spells or skills are inherently creative. Which I was mentioning because some people seem to be claiming that solving problems with skills is inherently "better" than solving them with spells. It's not hugely creative, but there is a bit of creativity in picking a...

It's as "creative" as using Move Silently to sneak past people. Face it - declaring you cast a spell is not creative. Rolling a skill check is not creative. Even a skill challenge is only creative to the extent you try to justify skills which are an odd match to the task. Being able to...

It just seems like there's a lack of stuff to aspire to. Sure, battle your way to the highest peak of sorcerous skill, so you can ... get yet another "kill people with fire" spell. With slightly bigger numbers. Wheee. I mean, the Archmage really says it all. "You are The Archmage, shaper of...

The problem I see is that in a long fight you could easily run out of all your encounter powers and be stuck using only at-wills to finish the fight. At that point, for many characters, there are no more actual decisions to be made - which IMO makes the rest of the fight pointless. If your...

That nails it on the head - exactly what I was trying to say. The reason why levelling up as a Wizard (or any character) is fun is not because your numbers get bigger, but because you grow in influence and power within the world. Because now you can easily do what you wished you could do three...

Rituals apparently fix everything in 4E. Not enough versatility? Rituals. Spells seem purely combat oriented? Rituals. What happened to X spell? Rituals. How does anyone do X? Rituals. Not having fun yet? Rituals. But where exactly is this information on rituals coming from? Not...

Everybody's talking about "bean counting" and "inventory management", but encumbrance isn't just for how many pounds of salt you can carry! Trying to drag an injured companion out of the fight? Encumbrance. Trying to carry a magical statue out of a collapsing temple? Encumbrance. Trying to...

Most of the time, it isn't needed, but when the PCs find a huge horde, it's useful to have a rule for how hard a time they'll have carrying it back. Or when someone gets knocked out in a fight, how fast can their friends pull them out of danger? I could see it being an optional rule, used only...

The thing is, I think they're not so much eliminating system mastery as moving it. They're moving it from character creation to combat positioning/timing. Or more generally, from strategy to tactics - less optimizing the build, less pre-buffing/scrying, but more trying to find the ideal battle...

Game mechanics can determine how a character actually feels in play. It's all very well to say that concept is the important part, but that only goes so far. For instance, I could be a Fighter with a big hammer, and call myself a Wizard with Fireball. But the fact is that my "fireballs"...

A point I forgot to mention before. When determining how awed/surprised people are by something, I like to use the "level rareness" guide. In 3E, I use this one, based on the "Aragorn was 5th level" article, although in 4E the numbers would obviously be different: Level 1 - Common. Level 2...

I agree that Wizards will be doing this stuff all the time - and I agree that that's awesome! It looks like Wizards will be the "fun" class - stealing the title from Warlocks, who seem more combat-focused now. You know what was fun about being a Warlock? It was being able to throw...

Just wanted to respond to this separately - I don't know about other people, but IMO, that was a large part of the problem with 3E multiclassing, not part of it's justification. Originally it was thought that something like Wizard 10/Cleric 10 would be fine because of versatility. Then most...

It's not a bad system, it's just ... underwhelming. I mean, some of the preview articles promised a five-star lobster dinner and what we get is a bologna sandwich. For example, I recall something along the lines of "any class, any combination, works" being bandied about a few months ago...

A lot of things have been swept under the rug for game balance in 4E, mostly successfully; but here, I think they've hit a roadblock. Horses are a double-hazard. Not only are they a huge sticking point for realism, they're also a genre staple. And that's a killer, because most people who...

Well I never argued it was a good act in general. I just claimed it was no worse than killing them. The sticky bit is the implicit assumption that allows "good" alignment to coexist with the fact that killing things (and taking their stuff) is one of the main ingredients in the adventurer...

It might not be that nice, but it's hard to argue that it's worse than killing them, since being dead effectively takes away all their free will. And since in most campaigns, killing evil creatures is assumed to be acceptable, I don't see a good argument against the helmet.