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As is my habit, I've posted my thoughts over in my blog. This short version is that I like that they're experimenting, but I'm not crazy about where they are at the moment with several of those areas of experimentation, and damage bloat is kind of through the roof right now. Haven

Tonight is the fourth session of what I expect will be a long-running campaign. It's going well so far. The players are being relaxed and groovy about rules changing from session to session, and we're using classes that WotC has temporarily dropped from the packet, while also adding in new...

A long time ago in my blog, I put together the following breakdown to explain why I thought there should be fewer than ten spell levels. Obviously this is based on 3.x D&D. tl;dr: If you start with modest effectiveness and increase upon it either eight or nine times (that's improvement relative...

Earlier tonight I ran the second session of my new D&D Next campaign, in a new setting. It's pretty awesome so far - the system has warts, it's true, but the players are having a great time and most classes have a satisfying number of choices at low levels. Clerics and warlocks (we're including...

I think they're doing some very cool things so far - not perfect, but interesting and quite promising. The fact that I'm already adding in homebrewed content is just, well, my nature. ;) Haven

Chris_Nightwing - They do, kinda. They don't tell you what you're allowed to buy, but they give you exclusive lists of benefits, with at-wills, signature or domain spells, and so on. It only makes sense that they'd have to structure the fighter and rogue options a bit differently to...

In my blog, I spent a bunch of time breaking down the Four Tenets of Rogue Design that Mearls posted, and how the current lack of a full-fledged skill challenge system means that rogues aren't great. (Also, some thoughts on the problems of the old skill challenge system, not that we don't all...

The thing that I particularly like about Specialties is that character creation is essentially reduced to four Big Choices, plus one choice within your class. I much prefer four choices that matter to two choices that matter and then a dozen choices that really... don't matter, because of their...

I really don't like the changes made to Specialties here - I thought it was pretty much genius in the previous round of documents that you got your non-combat stuff from Backgrounds and your combat stuff from Specialties. (Setting aside class and race for the moment, as those are a mixed bag.)...

My gaming group very much enjoyed the two sessions of Dresden Files we played. (It was only ever intended to be a short-run game - it was not because we were not having fun that it ended at two sessions.) My two blog posts reviewing it are here: Harbinger of Doom: Dresden Files RPG: Eyewitness...

As with some previous playtest releases, I've thrown together my responses as I read through it. Sort of like liveblogging the experience. Harbinger of Doom Now I that I'm done with it, I can go back and absorb some of the other opinions in this thread. =) Haven

Aaand my actual review. Harbinger of Doom: Game Review: Choice of the Star Captain For the tl;dr crowd: Loved it! (If this should be somewhere else instead, I'm good with moving it.) Haven

I've played the Free Trial of Choice of the Star Captain so far. It's very entertaining, and there's enough content in the free part that I feel like I got to see some neat stuff. Thanks, and it's definitely on my list of things to buy! Haven ETA: My fiancee enjoyed the game quite a lot too!

I've posted my commentary as I've read through the documents (more or less liveblogging) here. Now to go back and catch up on what the rest of the (EN)world thinks about it. =) Haven

Mostly I'm stuck on the list of bad ideas in the Game Play page. 1. Modifying DCs is not in any way easier than adding modifiers to a die roll, except that now one side of the exchange (the GM) does 100% of the math. Math is math, guys. A big pile of player-triggered modifiers are still going...

This thread is kind of huge now, so I'll have to go back and read all of it, but I've put up a blog post of my thoughts on it here: Harbinger of Doom Haven

I felt that there was a lot to like in the rules, particularly the balance of player power and setting grittiness expressed by the availability and style of magic. I was DMing, and found it to be pretty speedy to DM, though I frequently forgot about kobold outnumbering mechanics (but it didn't...

So - is it hideously gauche to just link my blog post of off-the-cuff reactions to the rules as I read through them? What the heck, I'll risk being hideously gauche, and if it violates a forum rule I don't know about, I will apologize to the moderators. Harbinger of Doom

How much importance does having the best ability scores have in 5e? Does "flattening the math" make it more important than ever to start with 18s in your attack stat? Is the math of skills likely to be flattened in the same way that the math of attack and defense is?

I can't help but wonder - in a conflict of such barely-imaginable scale as this one, how much - if any - of the combat is resolved with die rolls and formal rules, as opposed to approximation and DM fiat? If the former, how did you crunch the numbers and parse the rules in anything short of a...