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"highlighting everybody else's actions and complaints as if they somehow aren't as legitimate as your own thoughts and feelings" When people exhibit uncivil behaviors and self-contradictory / irrationally elucidated complaints, no, I don't see those actions and complaints as having the same...

I read this as being critical of the quality of what is written in a book / PDF / blog post by some corporate minion is OK, but being critical of what is written in an article / blog / message board post by a normal user is somehow verboten. Hear lies the art of civil debate. Rest in peace...

Ding! Ding! Ding! The uncomfortable reality is there's almost never a good reason to go off the deep end running down other people's games of choice. The nastiness stems from things ranging from trying to get the last word in to feel superior over to discourage support for competing products so...

There's a difference between unhappiness and the disproportionate heaping of abuse for fun and profit. People can be critical for feeling like there are features being left out of DNDNext and that's different then some sort of rage-quit rant about discontinuing support for your edition. There's...

Just make it balanced. If you balance it then there's no significant gain in power from multiclassing vs. playing a class through to level 20 then it doesn't matter if someone patches together frankenstein's monster because he still can't spotlight steal from anyone else's play style. Yes, this...

It's by and large edition warring by proxy. The loudest and most frequent voices hammering WotC are 3.X/Pathfinder preachers doing the same thing they've been doing since Wizards dropped the OGL and moved onto 4E and aggrieved 4E players who see their edition being put out the pasture. Lots of...

I'm pretty well sold on this association of stats-to-saves (though not on the damage side of the equation). I think I'm a fan of the general notion of active-vs.-passive scenarios for different ability checks mentioned earlier in the thread too. In particular, I think it sorts out the Int/Wis...

This impacted us as well. There was way too much of a "why bother,this was already reported by 'real' play testers who are 2 iterations ahead of us and we're just wasting our time with obsolete rule sets anyway" vibe going on. Addititionally, almost all the emphasis has been on character...

I dislike having a light crossbow and a heavy crossbow in D&D. Heavy crossbows (the ones that crank) make a complete mockery of armor. They are the same exact problem child as black-powder weapons. It' s abridge too far for me. Light crossbows of the step-and-draw variety are close enough to be...

The current set-up is fine for Player Characters. Adventurers are cut from a superior cloth. On of humanity's few distinctive features is that their innate adaptability lends itself to a better crop of superior outliers (read: heroes and villains) among their population as opposed to other...

That's really the elephant in the room that we keep seeing cludgey hacks for in every edition. Bypassing Hit Points with Save-or-Suck effects is the underlying problem that should be refactored directly. It sucks when it happens to player characters (see the pack of Ghouls in the A1 playtest)...

I reiterate that the fundamental flaw with that 4E / 3.X model was that all Feats needed to be fungible barring those awful prerequisite chains. If we assign an arbitrary metric like Character Points to a Feat, that system requires all Feats to be worth say, 2CPs. Any ability that's worth more...

I don't follow your logic here. Almost all those feats were terrible because they didn't balance well against other feats. +2/+2 wasn't worth the price of admission. Gaining training in a single skill wasn't in 4E either, but aquiring a new skill was often a worthwhile perk as part of a...

This works for me. I like the grouping because, oddly, it permits more customization. No, I don't mean customization for the players. I mean customization for the Desingers and Dungeon Masters. Here's the problem with a purely ala carte feats system like 3rd and 4th edition had: the only way...

Clerics are clergy. Paladins are laity. Paladins do not have and can not hold ecclesiastical rank or authority. They can not perform religious rituals or sacraments. They are, instead instruments who receive patronage from divinity. I think the best way to handle this, mechanically, is to...

I think that if I were allowed to smash people's sacred cows I'd be rid of the terms "skill" and "feat" and replace the whole thing with "Talent." Backgrounds would award you a suite of talents comprised of situations where your Ability Check (whatever the ability you use may be) uses a bonus...

I think my problems stem from inconsistencies and faulty assumptions that justify these monsters. The most glaring issue is the thought that indifference to Good and Evil makes something Neutral. That's completely wrong. Those who persue personal or institutional goals with depraved indifference...

double post - sorry

I'd like to see them be Touch when used to do damage, and Ranged when used to heal. So if you use Inflict on an Undead creature you can do it at range, but if you want to zap something for a bunch of Negative (or Positive) energy damage you're going to have to use the shock-paddles on them. -...

Exactly. Sometimes these sorts of regressions are especially disheartening because they undermine core principles that were used to try to sell the play-test / DNDNext concept at the outset. The idea of putting every task into a silo with a single applicable skill and ability score is...