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Right, and because there are bad parts of the realms, it's fine to introduce something worse? This is 4E logic again - "ah, hit points make little sense, so as a design convenience it's okay for us to invent healing surges which make no sense." I'd rather they'd left maztica intact and ignore...

I disagree. Monkeying with the planes strikes me as a way of stamping authorial identity on something that already exists, whilst changing nothing important. The effect of the planar change on the look and feel of 3E FR was pretty much zero unless you explicitly took the PCs planehopping. 4E...

Be careful what you wish for, Morrus. I don't think WOTC has the time or staff, and maybe not even the requisite passion or morale, to do a good FR or WoG version at this stage. IMO they should use something the size of Thunder Rift as the 5E setting. Pack it to the gills with adventure and...

Worldbuilding is D&D's meta-hobby, just as painting and modeling is to Warhammer games. I'm not sure this has registered with the 4E/5E designers, as Mearls is looking for the "heart of D&D" in dry mechanics.

The amazon.com reviews of 4E FR suggest otherwise, and given that 4E FR saw only three or so setting books for it, it seems extremely unlikely that 4E FR fans are "legion". Even on the WOTC boards, it's clear that the FR golden goose caught the spellplague too, and died somewhat. It's simply...

The easiest way to get the "Spellplague" tick off of the host is to revert to an earlier edition, and that's what 5E has to contend with. Knowing it's there, lurking in the future with it's retcon nonsense takes the shine off running any canon FR that acknowledges it, IMO. Like it or not, I...

Please no more purple prose of this type: My ways are of darkness, rogue. If you knew that, you might still be alive in your next breath, but for the shadow of my blade. - Drebbin Drax, Endarkenator ...as an intro to the new Endarkenator class. It started in 3E, and it's just awful. Also no...

I've noticed that everything I don't like about WOTC D&D is something with metagame motives behind it. This goes from the art direction, to the new FR, to categorizing classes and monsters, to the blurring of supposedly mundane abilities and spells, to awkward stuff like healing surges, and...

This strikes me as the kind of self-important pretentious goal that an arts faculty might ascribe to certain literature as a way of throwing the human condition into sharp relief. I don't think that I know anyone who goes to the D&D game table with this as their idea of a good primary...

When Arneson had players take individual heroes off of the battlefield and control them in a dungeon, firsthand, that was a paradigm shifter like perspective. 4E's gamist high level abstractions and dragonborn-and-eladrin WoW-ish implied setting, let alone stuff like exception based design...

The idea of "progression", "evolution", and "moving forward" with regard to art in general, and the artform of games design in particular, is a nonsense borrowed from science theory. Art is more like the fashion industry, which recognizes that it's just cycles, not progression, and little that...

Going to take a lot more than a "nod" to realism, IMO. Place maintenance of suspension of disbelief and "simulation" on a similar footing to the pedestal on which game balance has been placed, or see people walk away again, I'd say. Even after the huge backlash against uncompromising gamism in...

Oversimplifications like this are IMO counterproductive. Quests, puzzles, tricks and traps all fall under "exploration", then? Picking pockets has disappeared from the game because it falls into none of the above? I think the same design direction that led to 4E's narrow focus is still very...

D&D is not a vehicle to design the ultimate elegant unified rules mechanic, and there is no guarantee that such a result will produce a better result than something inelegant and quirky from a design purist's perspective. If people wanted what's being described here, they'd be all over games...

I agree; "vancian feints" are nonsense conceptually, regardless of whether it fits some unified design plan for powers. If you must restrict the presence of a mundane combat maneuver, a better solution seems to be to give it a chance of working. Not very D&D, but neither is the branch Mearls...

I don't know where this wishful thinking meme is coming from, but weird monsters are not equivalent to 4E's more extreme suspension of disbelief destroying, meaningless-in-all-but-a-metagame-sense mechanics. Every edition has weird monsters, from flail snails to stwingers. Not every edition...

Instead of trying to invent a better mousetrap for the umpteenth time, why don't they focus on consolidating, editing, re-presenting logically and balancing a prior edition? Imagine a balanced, unified, streamlined AD&D or 3E, with all the splat designed to work together and "knowing the...

In a world with magic, that's possible. What is not possible are 4E's common sense-defying mundane powers, like healing from dragon breath because someone tells you to rub some dirt on it, or the big bad being baited forward against all character or common sense because some crazy mundane game...

No, 4E stands alone in a cascade of powers and rules that either make no sense in some cases, or in all cases. You cannot hide behind the usual 4E defender defence of "well, prior editions did this a bit, so it makes no difference when 4E turns up the breaking of suspension of disbelief to 11...

Doesn't compete - your game has people healing by shouting at each other. And stupid "move the other guy's piece" like a boardgame, regardless of logic. And numerous other sins all gone over many, many times before. Your game has the problem, and no amount of rust monster bashing will help...