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The bit from that article that has me most excited: Yes, please!

Yes, so far I am quite impressed. They clearly put in the effort to get things right. I especially like the editorial comments from their D&D historian. ;) A very nice touch!

You are thinking of Heart of the Forbidden Forge, Dungeon 155. I am fond of that one too, although I never ran it.

So far, the podcast has done a great job of cutting to the heart of the changes brought by D&D Next. It may be the best way yet to bring somebody up to speed on what D&D Next is all about.

I agree wholeheartedly that WotC doesn't owe the playtesters anything, but I think they're wasting an opportunity by letting the playtesters sit idle for so long. WotC was explicitly aware of certain known issues before they even released the first version, such as inflated PC hit points and...

I sincerely hope WotC ramps up soon to tighter iterations of the public playtest. Otherwise, I see little chance of them releasing an adequately tested game in the near future. They should have been working on version 0.2 the moment they released version 0.1. They could be releasing version 0.2...

If n kobolds each have probability p of failing a save, then the number of kobolds who fail the save is drawn from a binomial distribution with parameters n and p. The average value for this random variable is n*p, so yes, if you had to guess how many of 40 kobolds fail if they each need a 14 to...

Well, I only intended my argument to address short-rest powers in the abstract. If you want to say that Game A is 3E and Game B is 4E, I would say that 4E added encounter powers that inflict more damage than 3E/4E at-will powers, but it then increased the number of hit points for both PCs and...

I'll take a stab at this. Let's compare imaginary games A and B, where A has only at-will powers and B has both at-will and short-rest powers. Let's say that we intend the typical at-will power in game A to inflict an average of 10 points of damage per attack. We design game B so that an at-will...

If adding short-rest powers makes no difference to scenario design and game balance, why include them? What if every 4E encounter power was usable at-will, and every at-will power were upgraded to pack the same punch as an encounter power? Maybe I would see fewer encounters devolve into a grind...

I agree with both Abstruse and FireLance. I see no rational reason why powers that recharge after a short rest should require every encounter to be an elaborate set piece, but 4E as a whole certainly encouraged that approach to adventure design. This approach pervaded everything from the...

Yes, we just need every spell to have a one-line version of its description, suitable for inclusion on character sheets, in monster stat blocks, and in spell lists by class. The short version should suffice most of the time, but the long version should be available for flavor and to address...

In addition to the points already made, the newer monster books include much more fluff: story hooks and other inspiration for incorporating the monsters into actual adventures. For me there's no question that you should prioritize the newer books first, with the Monster Vault giving you...

Count me among the disappointed but unsurprised. If there were a silver bullet solution that would fit in a few pages, we probably would have seen it by now. Instead of crude rule hacks, I think I would have preferred to see a discussion of tips for encounter design. Things like hazards that...

I bought the Red Box on a lark, and I think it's a good product. It's just not for anybody who visits EN World regularly. The target audience is either completely new to tabletop roleplaying or wants a particularly gentle introduction to 21st-century D&D. (You know, where higher AC is better...

Oddly, the way I remember how temp HP work is by thinking of them like "shields" in the Star Trek "Cap'n, our shields are down to 3 hp!" sense. Gaining x temp HP is like "recharging" your shields up to x HP. Maybe it's just me.

FWIW, I had never considered using tokens, but because of the Monster Vault, I'll give them a try.

I'm not. Summon Celestial Steed is a Paladin Utility 4. Doesn't that mean that any 4th-level Paladin can take it?

This. In the world of D&D, archaeology is more about rediscovering lost technology than finding trinkets that belong in a museum.

I assume that the target audience for Class Compendium is players who came in with Essentials and therefore don't have PHB1. In this sense, it does replace PHB1, in that instead of keeping PHB1 in print so that new players have access to its builds, WotC is rereleasing crunch from that book in...