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The trouble with Barbarian as low-culture warrior is that it both stomps all over the niche of the Ranger, and that giving a particular cultural level a class of its own is kind of at odds with the rest of the class structure. A Wizard from an Iron Age culture is not one class and a Renaissance...

Came here to say this- Ars was neat in that it gave both wizards and non-magical characters a way to progress without going out and killing things. You could focus on improving a Grog's combat skills, let a Companion get better at their particular specialty, or even have the combat characters...

Agree with the idea that more support for some of the settings would be a nice improvement over the way they were treated in 4e. In particular, I think Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Eberron would be really well served by the small core/plug-n-play module structure of 5e. In fact, it might even be...

It's just a consequence of the escalating hyperbole of the edition wars- people who disliked 4e said silly things like 'it's just like WoW, it's a video game now', which caused fans of 4e to up the ante by saying things like 'it isn't anything like WoW, in fact it doesn't borrow any ideas from...

I didn't read his statements that way- what I took away from it is that it takes a couple iterations to figure out the right way to integrate some of the ideas from the MMO world into a tabletop game. Which doesn't cut off the possibility of looking to MMOs and other video games for D&D Next-...

I think they are trying to balance designed adventures and undesigned, sandboxy play. If you have XP guidelines for a day of adventuring and guide. If you are designing an adventure: Once you have the daily guidelines and the easy, hard, average guidelines, you can just replace monsters with...

The Dragon and the Bear- the Ars Magica supplement that prosfilaes mentioned- is nice if you're looking for something set in the Middle Ages. It's from an older edition of Ars Magica, so it may be a little harder to locate but I think the publisher is pretty good about making things available...

Hire some decent action movie actors instead of a bunch of pretty boy Drama Club rejects, set the trailer to Slayers Raining Blood or Dropkick Murphies Sailing up to Boston instead of a discount Peter Jackson orchestral score. As climactic scenes of stuff exploding and fire flash on the screen...

One of the assumptions in comics that helps that work that isn't present in RPGs is the idea of pairing off heroes and villains- send the Hulk to fight the giant monsters, let Hawkeye pick off one or two as they come in the door, Captain America can go lead the people trapped in the building out...

Oddly, I chose none of the Animal's Thing spells and instead included a comment that said 'it's stupid that there are six of these spells, and more stupid that there are six more to learn if you want the 'Mass' form of them'. One second level spell called... 'Noun's Attribute' or something...

Whether or not this is actually true is the crux of the dispute between two major constituencies that WotC is trying to please: those that think good ideas should go in 5e because they are good ideas, and those that think good ideas should go into 5e if and only if they do not move the game...

I think roll20.net will make this possible- you can use the FoW on any map, and it definitely supports making hex-style maps.

Race, class, level. Level-based advancement (..e, you get better at everything when you get better at anything). Six ability scores with humans typically in the 3-18 range (adding a high end for monsters and gods is fine with me). The nine alignments. Rolling a d20 as a core resolution...

There are several options- you can get web hosting really cheap (a few bucks a month) and most modern hosting services will make it very easy for you to install something like MediaWiki, which can be set to exclude everyone without a login that you provide. There are also file-based mini-wikis...

They need do way with instain Baba who mispronounce they yaga.

Bizarre, Impractical Racial Weapons: Gnome pick, I'm looking at you. Worse though, the core races apparently used up all the semi-reasonable weapons, and the new guys on the block are left with a whip with a cheese grater/yo-yo glued to it to define their rich culture. Obvious Feats: Pick two...

I think that's a really good point about the way that 4e was introduced- I think it explains some of the '4e is a boardgame' edition warring. My first and second impressions of 4e were both bad- first impression because looking through the books it seemed unfamiliar, and second impression...

I actually like the diversity of weapons. WFRP used the broad class-like system because of its wargame legacy (where it makes sense to not detail every variation in sidearm of every single soldier in a unit) and it also works well if you are making a generic system that is equally applicable to...

Building on Oversquid's mention of a Chernobyl-related area, the Pinsk Marshes were cool before Chernobyl even existed (truly, they are the hipsters of the Slavic wetlands). Impassible to armies, a place of refuge for guerrilla fighters and people fleeing from bandits. Even before the...

I've liked the things I've heard and seen so far about 5e, which is the most significant single thing for me. The VTT decision is too new to see the actual impact of yet- their online offerings have been a very mixed bag, but there is a lot more data and options for them to work with now. As...