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Increasing monster accuracy will be a nice touch. Hopefully healing adjustments will focus on the Healer specialty and maybe bringing back Second Wind or some Combat Medic functionality. The Wizard definitely needs the 1d6 Hit Die. I like the realization that the Rogue needs more than just Sneak...

If the expectation is that IP Security / DRM will eliminate all piracy then people have the wrong expectations. Arguments based around those ideas are pointless tangents. Pirating / bootlegging D&D books has been happening since the 70s. Likewise, the idea that each player is going to have their...

That's already anticipated in the business model. Gaming tables have been sharing the same set of print books among themselves since the 70s. People have been making photo-copies for a long time too. Unlimited push-button redistribution of copied files across the Internet is the scale you want...

That would be awesome, but the platform dependency would cheese some people off. The nice thing about PDF is pretty much every PC, MAC, and device running iOS, Android, or a Linux distribution can read a PDF. I get the importance of being as agnostic as possible in terms of operating system. On...

I just have to wonder how many of the "this format or bust!" assertions are really just "non-DRM electronic copies so I can pirate it or bust." People that are only interested in the game if they can torrent it for free aren't the potential customer base in the first place. - Marty Lund

Good point! Once you reach, say, 4th or 5th level spells casters should really have to trade out lower-tier spell-slots on a 1-for-1 basis to keep everything tidy and relevant. 4/4/4/4 levels up to 2/4/4/4/2 and eventually 0/4/4/4/4, 0/0/4/4/4/4 etc. Or you could mix-and-match among them with...

Bingo. The Fighter and Rogue don't have an expanding tree of slots like casters do. If all the Wizard got was more and more 1st level spell slots and maybe the ability to cast more of them every turn then you might have parity. That's not how it is, though. There's no AEDU enforced parity in...

Should they become useless? Never. You can strike fear into the hearts of 1/2HD Kobolds and impress folks at children's birthday parties with those until the cows come home. Should they become statistically irrelevant to appropriately leveled challenges? Definitely! They idea that you get to...

The models presented for XP buy-in so far look like disasters waiting to make land-fall. With those models eventually the math plays out so that it becomes empirically superior to dump 10,000 XP into a handful of multi-class levels instead of a fraction of a single higher level - even if it is...

The real problem in the math is going to stem from figuring out some sort of scaling metrics to deal with all the math problems. First of all, the cost you paid for an off-class level increases retroactively as you level. Fighter 1 / Thief 1 doesn't seem like a big deal. You pull from the...

Well, since the play-test has been giving us binary choices of sub-races at the moment let's continue the tradition (with tongues planted firmly in our cheeks) Tiefling Weapon Talent: Knives, Whips, Spiked Chains Senses: Low-Light Vision Contrary: Tieflings have Advantage on all saving throws...

Multi-classing in D&D has always been a train-wreck of an affair. Half the people are trying to create a concept that they can't get due to poor customization options in character creation. The other half are twinks trying to power-game. 3E multi-classing certainly made the jobs of both these...

Advantage and Disadvantage are are subjective metric anyway. If you are aware of the location of someone within 5' of you but you can't see them you can still swing a sword at them. Assuming they are trying the same thing there isn't going to be a whole lot of effective dodging, feinting, or...

Our second session of the D&D Next Playtest took about an hour and a half to play out. Our High Elf player was out that day, but another member of our usual gaming group was back. He wanted to play a Gnome Warlock. To keep things in line with the play-test materials we built him as a Lightfoot...

Morals shmorals - Tiamat and Lloth get to hand out divine magic spells at their whims, for pity's sake. Divine magic is basically assign on the basis of fealty and patronage. Even in a setting without personified deities these metaphysical ideals (good, evil, or indifferent) hand out and...

This can of worms has been open for decades now: divine magic vs. arcane magic vs. psionic power. Transparency was a serious technical issue, but power-sources for magic are even more of a hot button because they challenge the concept of ownership of power. Some people are really averse to the...

Keep the unarmed damage die low (1d4). Give the Martial Artist more of them (2d4). Make them Exploding Dice (re-roll whenever they show max values). Make the to-hit roll while unarmed Explode too (roll an additional attack on a crit). - Marty Lund

If I wanted to play Rolemaster I'd play Rolemaster. If I wanted to play Tri-Stat I'd play Tri-Stat. If I wanted to play Paladium ... welll ... let's not go there. - Marty Lund

Divine and Arcane classes will scale just fine. The Paladin will get more Smite-y and the casters get higher level spells. Rogue's already scale Sneak Attack dice. Barbarians are Slayers with a Specialty and Background. Unarmed fighting looks like good ground for a fighter variant. Rangers...

True - in large part because their combat effectiveness didn't adequately scale with level, while those of the caster classes did. I'm heartened that Combat Superiority dice scale over levels. I'm pretty sure A tenth level wizard is going to do much, much more than 4d10 damage vs. a single...