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How about his fellow party members extol to him the virtues of being an adventurer instead of being a farmer? :) ...or... --The druidic magic causes the crops to drink in too much nutrients and a sinkhole forms between the fields and the Underdark. --A rampaging hobgoblin army recognizes the...

I think I generally agree with this. There is a reason that so many people compare 4e to WoW and that reason, IMO, is that WotC pushed that relationship. There is very little similarity between the two (and people who play 4e learn this pretty quickly) but I think WotC saw WoW as the growing...

Agree with much of the above. I never run cannon but often adopt the recommended cannon into my game. If it fits, awesome. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't exist.

Another vague figure comes to mind that WotC spend some $30mm on their entire digital initiative (probably spanning more than just D&D). That'll take a while to earn back, but I actually think DDi will do just that. DDi is a mechanism to not share the revenues of D&D with distributors...

Absolutely. Of any company in the industry, I think Paizo has earned it. I remember thinking "WTF?" when Dungeon and Dragon got sold to some random company with a weird name and then slowly becoming enamored with their work. They ground out their reputation, it is well deserved, and they are one...

Not sure I totally follow. The "general wisdom" comes from an article Sean Reynolds posted a long time ago, the "$10 about equals DDi profitability" is from the DDi pricing, the "Pathfinder outselling D&D" comes from the OP's link. I'm assuming then that you're asking if I have an educated guess...

I believe the general wisdom is that each step of the publishing process is a doubling. So if a book sells for $40, WotC got $20, and paid $10 to print it (i.e. $10 profit). So a DDi subscription is about as profitable as selling a subscriber a book a month. I'm stoked (and believe) that...

Two more followups on the idea of zonal combat refining the idea and explaining how zones help "adjust the dial" of complexity from battle to battle. The more time I spend with the idea the more excited I am getting by its prospects but I'm still a bit nervous that in a few weeks I'm going to...

I started working on a different base-format for combat that focuses on zones instead of individual squares. Using power point to map the relationships between zones has been incredibly helpful because power point's focus on vectors makes colorization quick and easy to easily communicate...

You're probably even better off in 4e because you can put it anywhere without tanking a defense/save. It would still be a terrible choice to put it in Con, which is probably an argument that Con is too good in 4e. It is sort of the reciprocal to the fact that Cha is probably too weak in 3...

A change on tactical combat from squares to entire zones. The effort was inspired by a blend of Dresden Files RPG and the contributors to the site.

I can definitely see an evolution with almost all of it relating to how much time we as a group can commit to the game. There was a time when I felt it was really important to create a detailed weather generator that would only gradually change the weather based on the previous day's result...

I agree with the sentiment of what you posted, but I disagree with the extent of the sentiment. At the end of the day, my take on this guy is, "I'd rather not have a beer with him" but I think he is harmless and is merely voicing his (distasteful) opinion. Moreover, the fact that his opinions...

It might be stretching the terms of the debate but it might also just be a different perspective. I'm honestly not sure. I'll try and expand my thoughts and see if we don't have more shared ground than we thought. What I am saying is that within specific groups of people dialogue and debate...

I generally agree with the following caveat: It is the joker's duty to know his or her audience. Sometimes somethings in some scenarios just aren't funny and are better left alone.

I guess it depends on who the profitable clientele are. Someone mentioned a few weeks ago that their FLGS sells beer and wine and is also a pizza parlor. If the majority of profit comes from adult gamers, giving them an excuse to drop by or linger longer never hurts.

First update is a graphical whine about the compounding challenge of designing anything. Second update is an idea for narrowing the scope of what an action does with the hope that a narrower scope helps people choose more quickly while still being effective.

I guess the initial question is "should we?" A great many things are hand waived in RPGs such that all forms of strength are represented by a single statistic and most forms of damage are absorbed by a single pool of hit points. In life, age can bring with it a great range of progressions and...

If I recall, WotC acquired a company specializing in board games right around the time the focus and quality improved. No doubt the shift towards board games is indicative that piracy remains a problem and so R&D in physical products has a more reliable return, but I don't think it says much...

Well, the frequency would depends on how much damage your players deal and how many opponents there are. If you examine it at the extremes, if your players only dealt 1 damage, then every foe would reach 1 HP. If you had many foes, then you'd expect more to randomly end up at 1 hp. In other...