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Well, given that the general status of D&D worlds sans adventurers taking specific action tends to be exactly "A great threat gathers, the existing forces of civilization are unable to beat it back, darkness conquers all, and evil rules the land.", I'd say that it's not so much poor design as...

You know, in reality, many beat few. That is to say, when you remove the nastier forms of force-multiplication (few beat many when the few have armor and close air support), when you put a small band of elites against a large band of almost elites, or a really large group of competents, numbers...

I cheerfully await the possibility of an exotic weapon talent tree, which gathers all of the nifty things we've seen monsters do with nonstandard weapons in one place, and gives rules for how to access the talents and what this access represents in-game (I.e.: whether the talents represent...

Well, by the preview materials, they do have large and obvious holes, the biggest so far revealed being the lack of transparency between PCs and NPCs. The characters don't know that goblin picadors and bugbear stranglers are meant to be single-encounter monsters; if they encounter mundane...

Corollary: If you read something that begins with "I'm not trying to insult you" and contains no ", but...", you should maintain the benefit of the doubt that the author isn't trying to insult you. If you write something that begins "I'm not trying to insult you...", you should probably rewrite...

One little mental paradigm shift I've personally found helpful to assuage my simulationist tendencies is to make roles descriptive, not creative. That is to say, there are creatures, and certain creatures have abilities, powers, stats, etc., and that the sum of these stats produces a level and...

The first step, of course, is to toss the DMG demographic and weath-by-level tables into the same pile of rules that bag-o-rats and conscious-but-dead characters. Then, you pick your named character point, your heroic ratio, and your power curve. For me, it's usually about level 6 for the...

Hah. Of course the Grey Wanderer could get across a chasm. He just makes a fireworks-powered rocket, shoots himself across, and waits for Eru to reincarnate what's left of his body on the other side. Of course, given the D&D baggage placed on the term 'archmage', I wouldn't put any of the...

How dare you talk about my mother that way?! "Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the world explodes." Whoops. Either you have actual physics that says things like "Regardless of general consensus A general question to all those who say that rules must be the physics of the gameworld: do you...

I see no conflict. JIT (with just-in-time being before anyone made a decision in which the rule would b a factor) rulemaking is not fiat, it's houseruling. More to the point, "Make a new rule and stick to it." is not the same thing as "Arbitrate without apparent rhyme or reason." DM fiat is...

Yes, this is a failure to communicate here. Physics describe something (generally something physical) that happens in the world. If the nature of the game world is that some characters are PCs, and have their ability to jump gaps resolved by a d20 roll plus a modifier, and some characters are...

What we have here is a persistent failure to communicate. At the point when the DM decides that you can fey step with another person as long as they're under your encumberance limit, we've got a rule. We've got a statement about how the physical universe works. We have, in fact, a game rule...

Well, to continue the metaphor, players expect to belong to the same inheritance hierarchy as every other roughly humanoid creature. When it's obvious that other creatures are using neither constructor or logic but public setter functions to access their vital stats ("He has 50 hp, despite his...

Point the first: I may be misremembering. In what cases to simple bullet wounds in cut scenes inflict crippling injury? There appears to be a distinct corellary between proximity to crashing helicopters and long-term injury in the CoDiverse, and headshots are generally always lethal (to you as...

I have had an epiphany. The 'rules are not the physics of the game world' mean 'the rules as presented in the default materials are not necessarily the final word on how the world operates'. As I understand it, you all aren't saying 'there are no rules'; instead, you're simply reserving the...

Oh, yes. Most people either turn their D&D worlds into full-on dungeonpunk worlds that bear no resemblance to any genre but high-level D&D, or treat the expected wealth and leveled NPC by community charts the same way they do cleave and the bag of rats. The rules produce bad results, so...

Yes, that's true in our world. In our world, a man in a nightdress flinging sulphrous bat poo at you is not a deadly threat, human-shaped creatures taller than about eight feet start suffering from massive health problems, and dragons can't breathe fire and don't fly. In D&D, these facts, like...

Acting civilized (paying taxes, not pilfering magic and treasure from the recently- and long-dead, treating ancient dungeons full of eldritch horrors and deadly traps as things to be avoided rather than your 9-to-5) is contrary to the Adventurer alignment. Conversely, engaging in deeds that...

"Waitaminute, there's 50 of you, you're all burly farmers with ready-made polearms in your barns, and you can't deal with six lousy kobolds on your own?" "Well, we could but that would be an alignment violation. I mean, no one expects you to leave the dead alone or pay taxes on your...

I think that this is the result of mixed-up terminology. Physics is an interesting branch of science. It has oodles of what and extremely little why. But, and this is the thing about it that makes it used in the metaphorical case, the lack of why does not detract from the what. The theory of...