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You really need immediate damage prevention instead of post-facto healing. Protect for the Fighter works on that. The Warlord should be able to do it at range by yelling at you to duck, adjust your stance, or look out. They actually are a core fictional archetype very early in literature. Most...

They should totally add that in the next pass. Actually, I think I'd like to see an arbitrary fixed progression for each Fighter style, Rogue scheme, Cleric domain, and Wizard tradition. Then you can deviate using whatever level of customization the table (via the DM) agrees to. So you could...

You're overlooking the Design Goal of having a pick-up and play level of complexity available for some players. The whole idea of Class - Background - Theme was that you could just make 3 choices and play the game without gimping yourself. Adding in combat styles is another layer of complexity...

No. If you're playing D&D to have fun at the expense of the other people at the table then you are missing the point. If your idea of fun is "I get to constantly overshadow everyone else's characters," you're doing it wrong. Yes, it is. Yes. It should be balanced - not just "more awesome...

No. I brought up Gamist for a reason. Just x2 attack without drawbacks breaks the damage curve and the action economy when it comes at the price of using your off-hand and maybe 1 or 2 feat slots. The player who embraces "a bunch of awesome" that's grotesquely out of balance with what everyone...

Frankly, I hate the two-weapon fighting mechanics now, and the "improvements" proposed. I'd be happier seeing a 4E style treatment where two weapons let you open feats for small bonuses. Simpley saying, "I've got another weapon in my hand so I get twice as many attacks as you...

I actually kind of hate intimidate as a skill. It's too much an attitude (player choice) and aptitude (character attributes or a social perk of a background) and less of a learned skill. It's a form of persuasion with a lot of nuance. The effectiveness of a threat in terms of skill is way more...

Irrelevant. We're talking about survival skill and investigative training. In those situations you train eyes, ears, and methodology or you aren't trained. Paying attention to touch, taste, and smell can be nice too, but they aren't the focal points. That's not a skill, that's a physical...

The real problem is assuming that because sometimes listening or seeing might appy separately that you need separate skills for each. You can have, say, a racial bonus for keen ears exist right alongside a skill training in perception or awareness. If you are actually being trained to look for...

I'll give White Wolf credit on one thing - no matter how borked their game systems are, their World of Darkness setting mechanics definitely have structure for social and exploration pillars. Albeit, this is probably because they assume a modern setting everyone is familiar with and force...

If you're afraid of the Tolkien estate, just model Halflings as slightly pudgier Nelwins from Willow. Seriously. They aren't Dwarves. They aren't Gnomes. They are half-men, and it works. Small-footed bobble-head dolls that look like they crawled out of The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker are not...

Highly unlikely. I've surveyed way more hack-fests than deep exploratory and interactive games with little-to-no combat. Heck, pretty much everything the RPGA has handled in the last 20 years has been a hack-fest. - Marty Lund

The d8 HD Rogue works for me. I'd like to see the Rogue get a bonus when attacking with advantage to the effect of being able roll his Expertise Dice pool for Sneak Attack without actually expending the dice. So his maximum damage doesn't go up, but he can use the Expertise Dice on additional...

There's always been a problem with D&D's leveling system basically being little more than a treadmill for increasingly irrelevant HP on the one hand and disgustingly broken Spell Slots on the other. Once you started hitting double-digits the disparity got so awful many people wouldn't even play...

Expertise Dice are perfectly fine as a shared metric (means to quantify a resource). Maneuvers (how you spend the dice) are what need to be differentiated between the classes. There's plenty of room for overlap, but each class also needs ample space where they do not overlap so as to define...

Tim's completely right that if WotC had published the same product with the exact same content it would've suffered horribly due to the sentiment that WotC was just making your re-buy your stuff for a second time again without adding adequate value. Pathfinder and 4E is pretty much an apples to...

No. You're missing the reference. As the war-game origins of the Fighting Man and Magician archetypes go, they were the guys that existed to do one thing - kill other units with swords or sorcery respectively. The Priest and Rogue archetypes are arguably mutations of those original...

I agree. It is almost like they went flailing around for a way to pad it with more non-knowledge skills because the list of physical skills was anemic compared to how many knowledge topics there are. I did like them do-coupling the skills from the ability scores, though. I'm very excited to see...

I've been an advocate for trading off lower-level slots for higher-level slots once you reach a critical capacity. It's definitely against the grain of D&D tradition (horde everything, give nothing back, trade in nothing), but D&DNext is supposed to be about improvement. It's close enough to the...

Well, the DM in the game I currently play knows better than that. The Blades of Bar-Aleem make it very clear when someone is not invited to the party and if she tried to intrude again she'd wind up in a shallow grave with no questions asked. One of the perks of being hardened mercenaries a...