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Either power mechanics are some form of actual truth about the world or the mechanics are entirely 'genre emulation' and thus of the form "can, but will never do this because it's out of genre / not fun / the designers hate it". You can pick one or the other.

Okay, so we're back to "common sense means we don't need rules." It must be real nice to always have a gaming group where everyone is on the same page about everything though, even when they have to extrapolate half of the rules from common sense. The reason I'd be writing up this document is...

Well, no. The alternative, which I don't like much either, is that they don't know this, and in fact your characters theoretically can do it at any time, but your characters will never choose to buff before an encounter because they are forced by the rules into being action movie protagonists...

The easiest way, and the one it seems like they've chosen, is just to reduce the amount of buffs people are putting on in the first place. Making buffs easier to cast in combat is another one that can go along with the former, such as minor-action buffs, but a lot of those are going to be...

They seem to be missing 2e Kuo-Toa, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what the official illustration of them looked like. For my money (and based on my recollection) my favorite Kuo-Toa design is still the one used in Baldur's Gate II, but unless the 2e book version came close to that...

Of course. The question is whether the second target also has to be adjacent to you. If it is, then the only problem I have with Cleave is gone.

Hate podcasts so bad. Anyone feel like transcribing the important details?

Well, given that our starting point is madness, no, this is the direction directly away from it. Deciding on a specific rule is what's difficult, but not what shouldn't be attempted. That's what I'll need to figure out. Perhaps. I'd need to look at it on an actual map grid and run it by the...

I actually don't really intend it for distribution beyond my personal gaming circle, because it seems like it may be easier to write by copying massive amounts of text from the 4e books than by using page/line errata. I'm also pretty confident that there aren't that many edge cases in the...

MapTool's brain actually does work differently from a normal human's. :)

Actually, one of my goals for the revision of 4e powers I plan on undertaking is to not add more than one sentence of text to the typical power. No one wants this because as WotC accurately stated, it's 110-some lines of text. I'd be awful displeased with myself if my revision got up to 20. One...

Maybe. My "common sense" tells me that in the following situation, a Cleave would be ruled out because of blatant physical impossibility: ... .1. FX2 .X. Where F is the fighter, X is a wall, and 1 and 2 are his initial and secondary Cleave targets. There are definitely people on this board -...

Er, well, of course you can cleave the rats you brought along with you. They're... valid targets, even if the player and character have both clearly gone mad, and I'll just sit on the other end of the table and shake my head sadly while you flail away at rats with a greataxe in order to have a...

Cyclical initiative can go either way. I've played another RPG system where initiative is rolled every round, but it's also a system where acting towards the start of any given round matters a lot more than in D&D. Cyclical initiative would be terrible and bad for that. In D&D, you don't lose...

...there are definitely major systemic things about 2e (like saves going down, instead of up) that I like better than 3.5e. And hey, in 3.5e, because of that exact change, we have the reign of save-or-die and save-or-suck spells. But hey, look on the bright side! At least now you can be...

I looked at the questions more this way. In a normal situation, 4e Cleave's wording is absolutely fine. This covers 90% of all situations. There are still 10% of situations where Fighters are using Cleave, as written, to attack through impenetrable barriers (cleaving to the opposite side of a...

Er, what? I read the data on what the ability does, had no real need to apply imagination as it was obvious what it did and did not do, and presented it to my players. It was obvious what it did and didn't do from a quick glance at the rules. It was more obvious, if that was necessary to...

I'm of the opinion that it is, but I've never had to deal with the realities of word count and much prefer online media where it's not a big deal that something is 10 lines long as opposed to 14. For print media, the realities of word count often cause that last 9% to be sacrificed - for White...

On one hand, this makes them not ripoffs. Not ripping off a crappy, crappy Marvel character is good. On the other, there's a reason that Speedball's Iron Ageified version is crappy, and it applies equally to the Shadar-Kai.

It weakens anything that uses burst attacks, period. Which, uh, includes a lot of monsters. I don't think it should be a problem, though, as long as you change it and 1-2-1-2 movement together, so that it's not faster to step out of any and all rains and auras on a diagonal.