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How do you figure? Animate Dead's a standard action to cast.

I played a druid in a campaign that featured a great deal of politicking and intrigue, alternated with battlefield scenarios. I spied in wild shape form, I could drop summons onto enemy forces from safety in the battlefields, and when it came to politics, "Do what we say or we will blight your...

OK. How do they work? Are they compulsion effects, overriding the facilities of mortals at key moments? Do they influence moments of random chance, weighting the scales of the universe towards a particular outcome in general? Most importantly, what happens when a Sufficiently Powerful mortal...

This, to me, presents a clear example of why consistent, reality-describing rules are important. The essence of play is making meaningful choices, and in order to make meaningful choices, you need to understand the world around you. Making the choice to engage in a wild mine cart ride when you...

Eberron has Siege Crabs. Not just mecha, but living mecha. Neon Genesis Outsider(good, angel), anyone? ...Huh. Now I feel the great urge to write a story in which Shinji is psychologically transmuted into a typical D&D adventurer at the beginning of the series.

That's the problem, right there; Power Attack can mean the difference between surviving an encounter (by being able to damage something with hellacious DR) or perishing. If you're expecting to be able to hack through your foes so quickly that one blow is expected to both hit and slay, and your...

What do you mean by contradictions? Does it interfere with your suspension of disbelief for a wizard to wiggle his fingers and then be able to fly, despite this not having an analogue in reality? How about a gold dragon doing the same thing with its wings? As a thought experiment, imagine...

I've got an idea: exploding dice. Here's the basic concept; we move to 4E auto-max criticals, and declare that if you ever roll a 20 on an attack (or a 1 on the save), the effect automatically succeeds, and effectively happens again. So, if you roll a 20, you auto hit, automatically do max...

Well, one way to figure it out would be to put on a Ring of Regeneration and fall off a horse until the cows came home, and not suffer a broken neck, nor any worse wound than being stabbed by a shortsword (which is to say, lethal to most, insignificant to you and other heroes). This would then...

Well, I think I get it. You know how the villians always empty their guns at Superman? And they're always surprised when it doesn't do anything? Well, if you assume that A:) the default assumption is that people can be shot (or die falling off of horses), and B:) you are incapable of noticing...

Don't forget to add that if someone's being swung at, their first reaction will be to get out of the way (move action) or otherwise defend themselves (fight defensively, total defense action). The end result will be a lot of whiffs and near misses, with a few solid 1d3 punches capable of...

I must say, I'm kind of looking looking forward to this power seeing use in my campaigns. Me: "The bugbear twists away, his grip on the poor halfling rogue Jorris unceasingly tight! Jorris, after that last hit, you are down to only 4 hp!" Jorris: "Poop." Krush: "My turn, right?" Me: "Yes! You...

Check. Putting everything in the same set of rules means that the PCs can go anywhere and do anything (or at least, anywhere and anything you've statted) without having to back off for plot reasons. Here's what I've discovered; players don't like hearing that their idea, which is supported by...

Hero, in this case, was a term of art referring to "A character in the game world who has taken enough levels in a heroic class to clearly distinguish him from the majority of the game world." Feel free to word-substitute that for hero in my post, if terms of art that replace standard English...

They put ranks in Profession(Farmer). Then they put more ranks in Profession(Farmer). They made their profession checks and were paid in wheat. Besides, there's worlds of difference between "There isn't a rule for that." and "There are rules for this, and they say that couldn't happen." Many...

How about this: The rules clearly and distinctly model the consequences of falling off of a horse. The rules clearly and distinctly model the effects of these consequences on a 20th-level hero with full HP not being CdGed by the ground. Of the clearly and distinctly modeled scenarios for...

I think one issue (or rather, one cause of issue in discussion that is itself a happy lack-of-issue) is that you have and accept as not undesirable an unusually high level of communication among your player base. If your players accept that things just happen in the world and approach each case...

Let's assume that there is dissonance in the players' interpretation of the world. (See my previous elf dex mod example for one such). If assumptions are not shared, you'll run into conflict when players attempt to act in ways that make sense according to their understanding of the world, but...

Celebrim, I think that the narrativists claim that there aren't physics to the universe; if the DM declares "The world is such." then the world is such (hopefully in accordance with the wishes of the the players and the development of the story). There are no physics, and consistency is not...

This has another good side benefit; it encourages people in leadership positions to be good leaders, rather than qualifying by dint of being able to survive the most recent scry-and-die attempt of itinerant adventurers. It also emphasizes that if you want to tear open the fabric of reality...