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Well, that's a pretty unfounded assumption. I hang out with many people who aren't gamers. And even some who've never played a video game that didn't come pre-installed with Windows. Most of them don't have any interest in D&D. Most people who don't find the idea boring, vaguely unsettling...

A question: Who are these beginners, who in this day and age of nerditry, have not played a portable game system tactics game, or WoW, or any one of dozens of games that are far, far more complicated than a 1st level 4e character? I haven't met a beginner in recent years who couldn't grok the...

So... someone actually invented a way to grief your own party in a PnP game? Fascinating. I guess it was only a matter of time, though.

Except, at a restaurant, you don't have to make sure with every single one of the new and old dishes that if someone orders the right (or perhaps... wrong) combination of items, it won't poison every diner within a 30 foot radius. Or make them all into toads. Or giants. Actually, if you know...

Which supports my secondary thesis that they're appealing to the old crowd, not a new one ;) As for multiple modifiers... we haven't seen how this scales as you level. I'm assuming there must be more modifiers, or this is going to be not merely simple, but dry toast boring. If I'm wrong on...

So, at best, you're off-loading complexity from the player to the DM? I'm not sure that's an improvement, either. Also, see my edit above. Shuffling complexity around to tasks that human beings are actually quite bad at, overall, isn't usually a good thing. For example, we're better at...

But, they got rid of a little fiddliness in choice of attack and replaced it with a lot of remembering and fiddliness every time you have to attack. That may be easier for some people, but it's going to be harder for others. And I think they're making it harder for the people they should be...

I'm paraphrasing myself from another thread, but I don't think this is actually "simpler." At all. It's more like older D&D, and therefore reads as simple to most of us, but it's actually very fiddly and less straightforward. You're keeping track of which modifiers are pre-applied, attacking...

Is it just me, or does that fail at the explicit design goal of being simpler for new players? Or, at the very least, I think it's more akin to old school games, but likely less intelligible to the non-PnP gamer. A set of conditionals seems far less intuitive and more complex than executing...

Cross-reference this kind of apocalypse with Big Damn Heroes. D&D is better at Big Damn Heroes than "Hunker down and pray" anyway. Magic slipping away makes a great book, but if I were to play a game, I think I'd prefer that magic be set loose. Signs and symbols are everywhere. Walls are...

Again, that's an extreme and bizarre reading that forces a sort of Vancian mindset onto something that really doesn't need to have any relationship to Vance. It's more about what's going on in the game world than it is about muscle. Abstraction of melee combat didn't go away when they created...

But you're the one suggesting that rather than having alignment as a weak blanket statement about him, he should be parceled up into these bizarre little boxes. Alignment isn't meant to work the way you're trying to use it, and is frankly nonsensical that way. In the traditional sense...

Sure, but human (and presumably halfling) nature is such that his beliefs will almost certainly tell him that being nasty to non-halflings is perfectly reasonable because they are evil, non-sentient, just animals, inferior, or any one of dozens of other reasons. They are not worthy of being...

This is a very extreme reading, as I think you know. There's a significant difference between, "I can't hit this guy with my sword again" and "I can't exercise enough control over this situation to get 4x weapon damage and a status modification at this time, but I can use a bread-and-butter...

And neither does Good behave goodly towards very many. That's how the vast majority of human beings have always defined good and evil, based on in-groups and out-groups. Even when a religious figure said otherwise and tried to throw it out, their followers put that part right back in ASAP in...

Point taken. This isn't going to be a huge problem at a good table, but I think you are undervaluing performance gaps. If one of the characters at the table is clearly not pulling his weight in encounters, it gets noticed. There are reasons the game is balanced around certain hit percentages...

A perception problem develops in the mass market, however. If a class rewards skillful play with higher performance, the difference between average user and skilled user is increasingly dichotomous. If top end performance is approximately the same, but one class makes it really easy to get top...

As long as complexity is distributed independently of role and power source, I'll be a happy camper. A simpler defender is welcome, as long as I don't have to give up a "complex" one. A simpler fighter is welcome, as long as I don't have to give up the current one (barring some clarifications...

That's sort of an extreme interpretation. Buying a set of appropriate saws, a portable mill, some measuring devices, and a hammer with a plan to change a bunch of timber into a deck is an entirely different proposition from buying pre-cut boards, having a frame delivered, and borrowing a nail...

That's more than a little high and mighty, and completely unfounded based on the content of the post. No small number of people who started in video games (with common slang terms like "toon" for character) have gotten into D&D after the fact. I was one of them many moons ago. This isn't even...