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An RPG which apes MMORPGs and M:tG for design direction. D&D is better and more "D&D" when it draws upon an important wargaming habit: attempting some sort of simulation of the topic at hand. Thus your RPG is arguably a regression from something done better decades ago.

It also destroys suspension of disbelief and frees you from having to model a world with any sort of fidelity. Unfortunately, for an RPG like D&D, this is poison and removes much purpose to playing a fantasy RPG at all. There's an article on the blogosphere about how going too far in...

That's a false dichotomy, and refers to definitions specific to you. Simple example is a D&D class, which has rules and archetypes mixed to create a whole. You'd be wrong to classify the paladin class as either all "fluff" or all "crunch", and D&D is full of such things, when it's designed...

In the case of D&D, I disagree almost entirely, and think that you're better off playing a game where this is true, such as Magic:The Gathering or chess. One of the main draws of D&D is that you're playing in a fantasy world, creating a fantasy world, believing in a fantasy world. Your...

It doesn't have to be. All it takes is for large numbers of former players and fans to start abandoning the latest incarnation of your game or setting, without being replaced by enough newcomers to matter, which is what appears to have happened. Add to that former solid brand names like FR...

Okay. I got the impression that distributors lost interest in all but a few companies, that there were extensive quality control issues, and that large numbers of books were going for a buck or given away in later years. Maybe 3.5 white elephanted them, but surely WOTC knew what would happen...

Judging by Candlekeep and Amazon comments, I'm far from alone.

But it's as much about what is left out as what is included. Tiefling warlords and eladrin don't suit a thousand worlds. They've no business being in the D&D baseline implied setting, nor all the modules and settings that entails. Dragonborn ended up stinking up FR, and they don't fit in...

Didn't the d20 license thing clog gaming store shelves with immovable dreck after the initial surge? An potentially harm the D&D brand, if you think in such terms? And lead to competing PHBs rather than just supplements? Why then is it a success from the D&D IP holder's standpoint?

Ah, this misleading canard again. All of those settings use an implied setting of elves, dwarves, paladins etc as a base to modify or depart from. If you throw mul in the player's handbook like WOTC did dragonborn, you pollute D&D's ability to act as a worldbuilding baseline, because a...

Thank you for neatly summarising why the article suggests that there's no sign of any paradigm shift in approach to design at WOTC. Laundry listing what mechanics "make the core of D&D" suggests that the point is still being missed.

Except that all D&D before 4E never suggested such nonsense, because all ways to heal were magical or natural healing. 4E is the only game that walks off the suspension of disbelief cliff by implying (with it's own jargon no less) that wounds are closing due to slick oratory.

It's still too difficult to conceptualise as an everyday, every-combat event. We talk about mothers lifting cars off of their babies because it's an exceptional event. Healing surges and warlords make a formerly passable abstraction (hit points) which mapped to natural healing and magical...

Let's try and map these abstract terms to real world concepts then. Hit points: An ability to withstand wounds or blows through physical factors, experience or luck. An elephant will have more of these than a mouse. An SAS officer will have more than a pastry chef. Armor class: A combination...

It's also a kludge that doesn't match anything much in reality, unless you start invoking Die Hard and marathon runners. The giveaway is that the term "healing surge" is a nonsense term, because there's no expression in real life that describes it. About as close as you can come is "second...

On that point, I think Mearls may need to consider that it's about as much what he leaves out of the recipe, as what he puts into it. Chocolate mudcakes might have flour, eggs, cocoa and sugar in them, but if you throw in anchovies and beef stock, then that chocolate mudcake you're making might...

The distinction is that these are settings. I really like Dark Sun, but it's a very specific world. If Dark Sun paraphernalia were the default in the PHB to build a thousand other worlds, I'd probably skip that edition too. Axiomatic simplifications like "crunch is better than fluff"...

Yet thousands of people have done exactly that when they saw the themes and flavor of 4E. I know I did. This is a big detail. The implied setting paints worlds. Do you want to play in a world with dragonborn, eladrin, warlords and tieflings in it as a core theme, or a world with dwarves...

Nevermind

I couldn't agree more. I'm not promoting rules mastery. But nor am I promoting stone soup settings, encyclopedic detail settings, nor some middle path between. I think you should maybe go back and read my posts a bit more carefully. And no edition helps you customise the implied setting, or...