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Oh no. They did the thing. The thing were you aren't considered a small business operator anymore and the Fed and Washington State dispatch their horde of micro-managers to bring your HR department to its knees. ;) (For non-US readers: when you cross beyond the 50 employee (non-1099) line you...

Well, layoffs have to do with the production of future products. That may or may not have to do with the success of already completed products. It really depends on the business plan. Sorry, W2 is a tax-filing qualification for an employer and employee in the U.S. - distinct from a 1099 which...

Again, "employees" or actual W2s with 35+ hours (what a "full-time employee" or "employee" means to a publicly-traded company)? Though maybe that number fits for FTEs. Paizo makes a lot more than just Pathfinder books, after all. Marty Lund

Not "how many", but "what" - full time with benefits, part-timer, contractor, paid intern, unpaid intern, subcontractor, freelancer who gets 500 words thrown his way every 2-3 months, etc. That's what I'm actually curious about. Marty Lund

Yes, I'm saying -I- had better never bother hiring (or even retaining staff) for a major push and then have to deal with layoffs after the workload drops off. Also, in many cases when you do have a cyclical (or otherwise predictable / scheduled) drop-off followed by layoffs that ax hits...

Note to self, never bother hiring employees to ramp up large projects in case I might have to downsize on a cyclical contraction. Just send in waves of self-detonating contractors and string along freelancers so I can stop giving them work when I don't need them anymore. Better just assign them...

If they aren't going to vomit splat-books then it probably makes sense that they downsized their editorial staff after the release of the Big 3. Does WotC even keep part-timers and freelancers for their core product teams? It seems like the RPG industry status quo outside of Wizards is to have...

"All of them" :D Seriously, though, I think you have some room to play with since a turn involves a bunch of simultaneous action over the course of six seconds. For the sake of drama, I assume nameless enemies fall at the start of middle of the round and drop out of the scene immediately but...

Oh, I just meant codified, sword-specific rules mechanics for half-grips, pommel strikes, and handguard entanglement / tripping would be a level of rules granularity I'd expect from like GURPS instead of D&D. "Describe an improvised / nonstandard attack and let the DM wing it," is totally the...

You're totally correct, of course. Plate is leaps and bounds better at defusing the impact damage. There won't be any "slashing" damage, let alone the fantasy trope disembowelment you see in movies etc. That doesn't mean you won't wind up battered, bruiser, or with broken bones. It does...

Ah, I see that I'm confusing terms here. When I hear "Full Plate" in a D&D discussion I immediately think of the specific "more plate-y-than-plate" class of armor found in the 1st Edition AD&D Unearthed Arcana supplement. It has 2 steps better AC than "Plate Mail" and absorbs a limited amount of...

Not since I stopped playing AD&D and Unearthed Arcana, anyway. They "had mail." They did not have lion's share of their manpower in mail hauberk's to the knee with mail coifs. Those were awfully expensive to create and maintain and thus were reserved to the nobility / officers / elites. Chain...

Yes. If you are only ever going to fight other rich people on a formal battlefield and the other 95% of troops on the army aren't going to come within a stone's throw of you that's fine. However, thought it may sound cynical the primary killing duties of the rich noble on the battlefield...

Eh, it's pretty dubious unless said noble was employed in an army as a specialist combatant. The sword is great for killing the bulk of enemy troops. It's your best bet as a side-arm when you encounter violence off the formal battlefield (bandits, cut-throats, uppity peasants). It's steel...

Eh, that's going a bit too far. Swords are quite good at what they are designed to do - they just aren't designed to kill people covered head-to-toe in Mail, let alone Plate armor. The overwhelming bulk of troops in medieval armies did not have those luxuries so the standard arming sword did a...

To be fair, Chain mail, OD&D supplements, and AD&D all have the Weapon vs. Armor Class Type table. I wasn't as useful in AD&D because of the introduction of "weird" armor types in-beween None, Leather, Chain, and Plate but it did make a point of hammer on the fact that Longswords are rubbish...

So you mean in 5e encounters are usually built so your typical Instance of a Group to, say, encounter a Dungeon should have 1 character to Tank, 1 character to act as the primary Healer, and somewhere between 2-4 (let's say 3 for the sake of average) random people to help keep up Damage on the...

Meaningless appeals to inconsistent semantics aren't going to get you anywhere. "Jobs," in highly performing parties existed from the outset of D&D. Class diversity (internal via builds and external via splat-book churn) came later. - Marty Lund

Back in OD&D we had roles. They were called "classes" and there were 4 of them. I can almost remember their names ... I think they went something like this: "Sword-guy," "Heal-bot," "Spell-guy," and "Oxygen-Thief." Sword-guy's job was to take hits, defending the rest of the party. Heal-bot's...

This year the Holiday Sacrifice was their integrity on the issue of Mythic Rares in Magic: The Gathering. :P I imaging they need to hire a few flacks and sacrifices-to-be to deal with the mess of trying to spin it as anything but a blatant cash-grab and a tapestry of lies. Hence the "Brand...