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I love Earthdawn, it's one of my favorite settings. I love the races and the attitude and the explanation for stuff like Dungeons. I love D&D4, great system. A+. I love the new Gamma World. I want to run a THUNDARR game in it. So I thought...why not mash them up? 1: The players start as 4E...

My impression is certainly not wrong, as I'm not talking about what people might answer when asked what they want (never a good way to guide development), I'm talking about the needs of the product. What you or I might personally want (a pony!) is not relevant to my point.

I think it's a reasonable question. As an aside, you might consider investing in the DDI. I was able to answer your question in spite of having no idea where my books are, because I just launched the Rules Compedium and typed in "Dazed," then "Free Action" and "Stunned" opening each in a new...

I would rule, "no," on free actions while stunned. Stunned says "you may take no actions." A free action is still an action. Therefore you may not take one. Looking under Free Actions, it doesn't make an exception for Stunned and the description of both clearly implies that when you are...

I cannot say definitively, but as GM I would rule "yes!" Though this was not my initial interpretation. Looking at the description of Free Action and Dazed, I find this under Dazed; "You can take either a standard action, a move action, or a minor action on your turn (you can also take free...

Ok, well I thought about it some more and I should modify my earlier statement. First, let me say that as a game designer and someone who's played every edition of D&D natively since AD&D, your observation is correct. You do have a pretty good...really, an *excellent* idea of who's going to win...

It is absolutely worth it. Worth trying out. We played with Essentials mixed in with vanilla 4E last night and I had at least one "Oh my god" moment when I realized what Essentials was doing. Mind you, when I *very first read about it* I thought I understood it and now that I've seen it in...

We've only played one session with both 4E proper and Essentials in the mix, and that was only about 4 encounters, maybe five. So there will be more reporting later. One of the players rolled a Slayer, I believe. One of the Essentials classes, and I think a Fighter subclass? I'm not super clear...

I have no idea what's going on inside WotC, but I know what I'd like to see, and I have an idea of where WotC dropped the ball. When I speak of dropping the ball here, I do so in the context of some very, very successful e-tools. The DDI is a huge success and, like Encounters, is a major source...

Advocates of the Open Source movement often blame a lack of "true openness" when their pet project fails. If only they'd been more open, more fully open, more openly open open open, then it would have been a hit. I think the Third Party Market was essentially an illusion created by the absence...

Chris Ware and Darwyn Cooke both at different times recently said that they thought it was somewhat foolish to make superhero comics for 30 and 40 year-olds. The premise behind their thinking, and I know other pros who agree with them, is that you got hooked on supers when you were a kid, and...

Isn't that the exact same question as the post you linked to? I've said this elsewhere, but I feel like the critical issue is one of motivation and I don't see a way to solve it without releasing a 4.5E. In AD&D, PCs were cut from the Conan template. They were motivated by what I call...

I've been thinking about the same thing, on and off. The goal of the designers was to remove those situations where battles were WILDLY unpredictable because the magic items people were carrying around were a: random and B: of highly variant power-levels. A Stone of Earth Elemental Control or...

I did something very similar, but for a different reason. I wanted to motivate the players to want to build their own safe-havens, towers, keeps, etc.... So I made adventurers unwelcome most places. Easy to do. Then I made travelling in the wilderness something that would, eventually, put you...

If you think D&D4's combat is long and boring, then it doesn't matter if you're playing Open World/Sandbox or not. It's long and boring. I currently think that D&D4 is exceptionally poorly suited to sandbox play, and that's primarily a result of two factors. 1: Magic Items are no longer a...

I've played at tables like this and I no longer think longer is better. I'd probably do a custom table. A friend of mine and I once did some work and sketched out a table diagram that would put the GM in something like a centrally located position and arranged the players so they were...

I already run the game off my laptop. D&D4, plus the Combat Manager, plus the DDI makes this so easy it's...it's revelatory. Before this, I'd have said it couldn't be done. I'd spend the money mostly on really nicely painted lead. Dungeon Tiles, other dungeon dressing. I think the actual...

I think the issue is a little more complex. But only a little. That there were too many settings is, I think, both accurate and obvious. I don't mean obvious in a pejorative sense, I mean "looking back, it was clear." Also, the 90s were a bad time for D&D as TSR had no real idea of what people...

I don't think the KODT fanbase was the key, I think it was purely backlash against D&D3. A lot of D&D players didn't want D&D3, they wanted AD&DAgain, and in many ways Hackmaster was that. It wasn't just AD&DAgain, it was a love-letter to AD&D and AD&D players. A friend of mine, owns a game...

Man that is old. I recommend his webcomic about basically the same thing. Speak With Monsters - A comic by Lore Sjöberg