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These are clearly results from a Mad-Libs-style 5e playtest tweet generator.

Apart from the fact that DnD is the near-universal gateway RPG, I like classes, scaling levels, and that the d20 mechanic covers most everything (3e was my first edition). Part of what I don't like about Vancian magic is that it's the exception to the unified d20. Skills, attacks, and ability...

You might be interested in Green Ronin's Psychic's Handbook (the rules of which are also found in their Advanced Player's Manual). It's a skill-based system similar to what I think you are after, the main difference being that each power gets its own skill.

We need to bracket being an "old-schooler" from being "experienced." Old-schoolers will tautologically be experienced gamers in most cases, at least in regards to time. But if your RPG experience is limited to early versions of DnD, then in another sense you aren't experienced at all! It's like...

I've been thinking of applying a similar rule to casters in general. Given how you want to use it, think of the caster check as a Base Caster Bonus, analogous to a Base Attack Bonus. You're right that it wouldn't scale as fast as a skill bonus would, but it still outpaces save bonuses as...

Well yes, and my point was that what you think the facts are are "rooted in personal politics," as I put it. I thought the point of subjectivity was covered in that statement. It's what lots of other posters were discussing. That's about the only reason to advocate that something be changed...

Yep, good point. The same is essentially true for the Afghanistan and Libya invasions as well. Remembering that does make the idea of a unilateral United States opposed by the entire world that much more of a stretch. Also, for me, the idea that the United States would just start attacking any...

Umbran was struggling upthread to come up with a better way of explaining the problems with the first blurb. I agree that "plausible" is a bad way of thinking about it, because it's clearly satire. But satire needs to be rooted in facts to be effective; that's what satire is for. It takes...

If you're fine with the penalty, and don't care about ever using it one-handed, then I'm not sure you need EWP at all.

BTW, happy first ENWorld post!

I can't see why it would. Weapons still need to be properly sized for their characters, or you take a -2 penalty to attacks. EWP: Bastard Sword lets you treat a Medium bastard sword as a one-handed weapon, if you are a Medium character. It doesn't say anything about treating a Large bastard...

Changing the subject just a bit here. I really want to get away from this kind of thinking. I agree that magic should feel different from mundane combat, but not if it means replacing an elegant Attack vs. Defense d20 roll with a convoluted, overwrought, and problematic subsystem like Vancian...

Health Levels are actually utterly unnecessary for Damage Saves to work, and I wish more such systems wouldn't try to use them. You rob Damage Saves of their elegance by adding other stuff to them, and it makes gamers who experience them assume Damage Saves are necessarily clunkier than they...

Hobo mentioned damage saves, which I like a lot, though I think as written they need some tweaking. Some day I might publish or publicize my variation on the damage save concept. I'm not aware of how WarHammer handles damage, dagger. Care to elaborate?

I simply don't buy this. Any big change in DnD has huge repercussion in hobby gaming as a whole because it is such a big part of the hobby. It's not like a Deistic god, winding the clockwork of what an RPG is in 1977 and then having no impact on the hobby's development. It's continued...

I'll happily grant this. Yes. DnD is rarely on the bleeding edge of gaming innovation, but it's great for consolidating those innovations and mainstreaming them. I'd say that whatever New-School-type games existed before the OGL, they had nowhere near the impact that the OGL did. Since the OGL...

Agreed with Tom Servo on the distinction between powergaming and min-maxing. Basically the latter is a subset of the former that focuses on improving one type of ability and the expense of all others. Contrary to some other posters, I think "new schooler" is a real term. As I understand it, the...

The case for 2: Like it or not, DnD has codified social encounters with the same essential dice-rolling mechanic as combat. We don't allow an attack to succeed just because it is described well, so we shouldn't allow a social encounter to succeed for the same reason. In either case, we want to...

Seems good to me! The Spontaneous Summoning power is a fine substitute, and the Domain powers look good. The Augmented Summoning is the only thing that gives me pause, but I think it should be fine, given its relatively limited uses and applications. I'm not familiar enough with Pathfinder...

If you're talking about the Take 10 thing, I agree. I'd probably say you can only have one available at a time, though you could switch by making a new one. You might be interested in the War Master class from SGG. A marshall-inspired tactical class with a bit of social-fu.