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Has anyone checked out Adventurer Conqueror King? It's pretty much all about this. I just downloaded the PDF off of RPGNOW, and I like that it has rules for all kinds of domains at 10th level. Attracting followers at a high level just makes sense, and it's super easy to ignore if you don't want...

Hot damn, that right there is a revelation.

Here, want to see what HPs look like in action? Check out this video of the fight between Hector and Achilles. Its a fight between a 7th level fighter (Hector) and a 14th level fighter (Achilles). In D&D terms, they're both doing pretty consistent damage to each other, with Hector even scoring...

Honestly, the more I hear from people talking about how absurd HPs are (they are), or how they want a skill system in place of classes, the more I realize that there's a generation of players undergoing the same thing that previous generations have: you're learning that you might not like D&D...

Fair points on all accounts. Pushing for more and more tactical verisimilitude is a sucker's game: every step you take in that direction reveals a dozen more weird disconnects. But if you absolutely HAD to have some way to make combat more complicated without throwing in a thousand...

Honestly, Defenders are a somewhat hacked solution to a bigger problem in turn-based combat games. In a real fight, if you try to move around a bodyguard, they move with you. You can't run a wide arc around a guard to get to your target because the bodyguard will move to intercept you, push the...

Thank you for pointing out another benefit to randomization: avoidance of cliche. Here's the thing:storytelling, in the best of circumstances, is hard. It's really, really hard. Dodging cliches is a full-time occupation for professional writers, and lets face it, most of them aren't that good...

Series: D&D with Mike Mornard Blog of Holding

I did? I just thought I said that one of the design goals was to minimize random results and make the gameplay a bit more predictable. Didn't realize that was controversial, as that it was a stated design goal.

What is it about D&D where if you say, "I play this way", within ten minutes someone will be shouting from the mountains that I'm not doing it right?

And while we're talking about random events, yes, the nice safe world of middle class Western society isn't very random. Walk around the French Quarter of New Orleans at 2 o'clock in the morning during Katrina then. Or trek through Sierra Leone. Or crawl through Moscow's hundreds of miles of...

That's a fair point, and one that is the source of many games try to answer. RPG's are a unique beast because of the influence of the fiction on the mechanics. In a board or dice game, and fictional element comes after the fact. You may imagine the lives of your Warhammer figures, but that is...

That's a very elaborate straw man you've constructed there.

And with a couple rolls on the appropriate tables, you've generated an entire story arc. If the players don't (ahem) bite, it's not a big deal; there are always more encounters. And you can have them catch word of a spreading lycanthropy plague in the halfling community later.

The core of the disagreement is one of thinking that 'fluff' and 'crunch' are separate, and one of thinking that the sole purpose of the numbers are to codify the fluff. I don't think you'll ever get these two sides to meet. Interestingly, one is based solely on DnD 4e. In the previous 30...

I think it goes without saying that even though I welcome randomness, I'm not going to be a slave to it, nor will I use it unfairly. If I roll on the random encounter table that the PCs encounter a dragon, I'm not going to have the dragon drop into the middle of the PCs and start roflstomping...

Yup. It frees me to think only as the NPCs might. Being caught off-guard is the point. And the players do know the difference: if you hit them with a dozen encounters to wear them down, they know that there's a narrative reason for it. Or you're just a dick. If they'd stuck trekking through...

That might be true in some games, but as a DM I have no idea whats going to happen. The PCs might live to become god-kings or die ignobly in a pit in the ground. They might uncover the vast conspiracy or become a part of it. I play to see what happens. If I know what's going to happen, I'd...

Beware of painting history in too-broad strokes. In the Middle Ages, you had the Cathars, Benedictine monks, and the peasant rebellions of Watt Tyler. None of these groups thought that power meant righteousness. Medieval knights fell to combat exhaustion, grew weary of bloodshed and retired...

The Death of Randomness If there's anything that can be said for sure about 4e, it's that random events are constrained to the combat board, and even then, the range of random events is highly reduced. A creature has an expected lifespan, an expected damage output, and an expected treasure...