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Well, they have a ton of familiarity with those other versions (they built the two most influential / important ones, so they aren't sparing their own work any criticism) and specifically offer a new product that does not automatically implement parts of those games that they thing don't add...

Yes, a binary, pass:do something/fail:do nothing paradigm is perfectly coherent. It's mechanical construct for a game. It has to be. That doesn't mean it is the only mechanical construct that is coherent. The game's history is rife with checks that are more than "pass: do something / fail: do...

In practice it still runs smoothly for a couple of reasons: The first and most important of which is that levels 1-10 spans all the way from the start of Adventurer Tier to the end of Epic Tier. That's 30 levels worth of 4E or 20-odd levels of 3.X. Broader leveling windows are counter-balanced...

The receptionist keeps getting Room 12 and Room 12A confused when giving people directions, it seems. - Marty Lund

The part that strikes me as the most funny is that "damage on a miss" isn't the mechanic in search of rationalization - "Armor Class" is the mechanic is constantly groping around in the dark for a rationalization and failing miserably. Completely correct. The last 1 point of damage in D&D was...

That's something you need to take up with Armor Class. Armor doesn't make you harder to hit. It usually makes you easier to hit. Armor makes you harder to injure when contact is made - creating a distinction between inconsequential contact, contact of minor consequence, and contact of serious...

The use of "Hit Points" in D&D was ported over from table-top war games anyway. "Hit Points" simply measured how many wounding hits a model or unit could sustain in a battle. Standard Infantry had 1 Hit Point. It didn't scale into the 10s or 100s. One "hit" in a melee engagement between two...

Pretty much going with full on replacement here. The power-train and chassis on this vehicle is much better. I'm scrapping the old model for parts. I just want to be very careful about action economy and time-sinks before porting anything too original D20 OGL. I think the Archmage Engine carved...

What does armor have to do with making people make as you? Nothing. They hit you. Armor is there to mitigate the injury suffered from being struck. Strike that "miss" due to armor don't fail to strike the target. They fail to damage the wearer of the armor. Still, strikes that fail the penetrate...

The lynchpin for me will probably be the casters. If they give muggle classes the 4-page class treatment and bloat a hundred pages of caster options like they did in AD&D, 2nd Ed, and 3.X (and Pathfinder continues to do) then I probably won't bother. 13th Age already figured out the solution...

I have to concur with the bulk of what Celebrim wrote. That said, there's nothing wrong with some goofy nods to Orientalism - as long as it doesn't irradiate a ton of fertile design space like the Monk-as-class paradigm has for the last three decades. Monk is a Background - coming from a...

Wow, it's ridiculously hard to pick just one. Background, One Unique Thing, and Fail Forward all feed into an overall concept that makes them excellent: the character-driven campaign. Instead of pursuing XP's and GP's, 13th Age characters are built from the ground up with a goals of...

More over, lasers really aren't great shakes and make terrible weapons. ;) Seriously, though, I can illuminate an area at-will and it takes, what, a couple of D-Cell Batteries? Look at how compact a Taser is some time. The amount of energy involved in most evocation cantrips is pretty trivial...

D&D really had a problem with Off-level monsters until late 3.5 and 4th Edition when things like Mob Tactics, Swarms, and later Minions / Elites / Solos were introduced. 5E bypassed the jury-rigging of a scale by flattening the math on Attacks and Defenses, so monsters that are 4-5 levels behind...

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?315975-WotC-DDI-4E-and-Hasbro-Some-History The change in corporate expectations created an existential crisis for the D&D Brand at Wizards. That was the direct cause of all the 4E / DDI / Digital Initiative "sea change" - a bid to grow revenues by a...

OGL was a gold mine for some 3PPs who didn't have to invest the fixed costs of building the OGL or the OGL's built-in user base. It was never a gold mine for Wizards/Hasbro and they never showed a hint of a viable business model to capitalize on it for revenue. It was more like a community...

I share the opinion that keeping a bunch of the fluff would've helped ease the continuity breach brought on by the necessary discontinuity in the crunch. I disagree with the notion that "enough people did to cause 4E's failure." Failure depends on your goals. The revenue goals Hasbro put on the...

It always fills me with a mix of wonderment and horror when I look back about 40 years and see how precisely they predicted our current state of affairs back before anyone had ever heard of a World Wide Web. - Marty Lund

If they let Megumi Hayashibara do the theme song I'm sold. In the end, I'm really not any more interested in people's assertions as to how they feel about games / companies any more than I want to know whether or not they feel constipated today. Criticism is not the same thing as a naked...

I think the perceived insults aren't well-founded. It's business, not personal. TSR/WotC didn't have a business plan for OD&D/AD&D/2E/3.X/4E that would generate sufficient sales revenue (and they traditionally milk the long tale of supplements for quite a while) so they created a business plan...