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You all know he's being taken out of context, and that he wouldn't support what you're trying to use his words to support. I recently quoted Mearls out of context, a bit of fancy footwork justifying 4E's dissociative mechanics as of Essentials, but I edited it out because times and views have...

Has anyone started a thread on this in meta?

Instead it gets promoted to news item? What's next, a little victory lap? Official confirmation Gygax supports 5e and 4e? Really unclassy. 20 to 30 years out of context, and conveniently he can't tell us what he'd say of today's standard of "realism" any more. And those words were directed...

Nm.

Ah, the old "it's fantasy, so anything goes!" argument. Close relative of the "it's just elf pretending rules, so they don't need to be any good, ur taking it too seriously". Nope, it still needs to be believable and envisionable, or why play D&D? They've tried that going out on a limb to...

In an RPG, where suspension of disbelief and visualization of a fantasy world is a reason to bother to play at all, they're plain old bad game design By taking gamist design cues from CCGs, board games and MMORPGs that don't even map to a fantasy reality without much handwringing, references to...

Only, they're not who get copied when fighters come in for "supe-ing up". Epic level occidental mythology seems not sexy or apparently sellable enough perhaps. There's seemingly not even a grasp of what a mythological bard is amongst D&D designers ever since 2E - that's morphed into a...

I'm going to throw something out here: D&D has powerful wizards that can outclass the warriors in some ways, and especially at high levels. Part of it's identity is unashamedly as an "Ars Magica Lite". Trying to balance the classes too much at all levels doesn't match D&D's fantasy reality...

Well, for some of us it just isn't, and never will be. Hundreds of thousands of ASCII characters have been spilt on the topic, both for and against, but the very fact of this may hint that the argument has purchase. I don't consider you inferior or misguided, but push come to shove, I don't...

Why is it such a sin to not even want to try 4E? There are games that I know to be flawed that I'd still love to play. They look like fun, and draw you in with strong themes despite the flaws. The converse is also true - probably what drove a lot of people to write off 4E without playing it...

I'm out because with core races and classes, as 4E FR proves, the designers feel obliged to retcon and kludge in entire empires of dragon mans, pretend eladrin were always there, pretend "warlords" were always a feature of FR's adventuring companies etc. Retcons due to mistakes made with the...

They've already struck out with me - the lesson from removing gnomes and finding people who were gnome fans encouraged their groups to leave the game was not an excuse to leave in their dragonborn, eladrin, warlords etc as core for another edition. Anecdotally, that guff has driven more people...

Don't have the patience to enter into a "what's wrong with healing surges" debate with you, especially when it's a well beaten dead horse. Google disassociated mechanics, then rethink your idea that the backlash against 4E was based on being sticklers for tradition, rather than people seeing...

I know you jest, but these are perfectly cromulent names for Hackmaster monsters.

Yes, I understand this. The desire to make the cleric optional has been responsible for a lot of arguably bad mechanics and non-archetypes, including healing surges, shout-healing "warlords" etc. When do we get to say the cure is worse than the disease? The result of trying to make the cleric...

It doesn't solve it - if they don't ditch the full overnight healing mechanic then it's still there. But if you significantly power up healing magic, then you can achieve much the same desired result (everyone near full hp, more of the time) without the silliness factor that comes with full...

The idea was to point out that it appears that there are simple, much more palatable alternatives. That they could ditch suspension-of-disbelief challenged mechanics like that for powered up magical healing. Full regain of hit points on a rest is, for me, a "creates far more problems than it...

Just power up magical healing. It's not rocket surgery. Traditionally: Fireball and lightning bolt do 1d6/level. To many opponents at once. Cure wounds do not scale by level, with the exception of heal, and affect a single ally, leading to metagame problems. Hmm. This precedent seems to...

They're directly pertinent. What does a hit point become if a 900 lb dragon, undamaged, has only one of them? What are they when someone can be drill sergeanted back to health? And what "in-combat healing mechanics"? All I see in "healing surges" is a lazily designed gamist contrivance that...

Of course 4E attempted to redefine this aspect of the game, and was duly declared "not D&D" by a large segment of D&D's former audience. Shout healing? 4E. Schrodinger's damage? 4E. "Healing surges"? 4E. 1 HP balloon animal monsters called "minions"? 4E. And given that I cited the Rules...