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I am with Tony Vargas on this one. "Shake it off, and get in there, and FIGHT!!!" is a ubiquitous healing mechanic in heroic genres. What some like to denigrate as "gamist" is what every action movie fan and every heroic comic book fan habitually thinks of as "awesome" and "dramatic". It...

I would bet my bottom dollar that the designers are looking at it from a very different direction. The main point is to allow the players to play the characters they want to play, without being tied by the apron strings to the cleric class. Choosing a cleric should be an interesting choice...

In 3e: "An armor check penalty number is the penalty that applies to Balance, Climb, Escape Artist, Hide, Jump, Move Silently, Sleight of Hand, and Tumble checks by a character wearing a certain kind of armor. Double the normal armor check penalty is applied to Swim checks." The penalties for...

I would add...as Illusionist : Magic User I like all three. That they (apparently) need to classes is quite an embarrassment.

I can promise there will always be an elven fighter/wizard who will have good enough reason to try. That is practically bovine. Then what do you say to the minmaxed human fighter/wizard who wants some of that action? Or the elven wizard? Or the gnome illusionist?

That is a big part of the problem right there. Light armor is much too good, and then we "must" put this squeeze on the heavy fighter because there is no room left to excel. That was already an issue before even bringing the Wizard into the discussion. The problem will be approximately 1000X...

Few people seem to recognize when sucking up the hit from an OA is a good tactical move. So do I get to make my cool move with no penalty, or is it just disallowed completely as a penalty for being more skilled than everyone else?

Nobody would ever challenge a DM for (yet again) apparently rewriting the rules in some arbitrary fashion because he feels like it. No, sirree. Just letting the DM make up stuff always speeds the game up.

Not a hybrid. In the days of only blunt weapons for clerics, the curved blades were simply a substitution/equivalent. I believe the rationalization was that a blade in the shape of the moon could be properly blessed, and therefore not a hindrance to druidic magic in spite of being made of metal.

If what you mean here is that Wizards are simply avoiding armor because of a general manifest inconvenience of the stuff: N-O. That tradeoff is not supposed to be in balance. Armor is good. More armor is better. And more armor is money well spent approximately all of the time. That is the...

I think you put your finger on an important piece on the problem. There was a concern that in a simple "AC = armor + shield + dex" throwing a very good magical shield in could potentially blow the curve. (I am not agreeing with this sentiment, but I have seen this argued.) OTOH, there is a...

In 3e using a shield did give a penalty to hit without proper training. Let's keep in mind that in 3e, heavily armored character already had 4 feats to wear their use their armor and shield properly. Then they created additional feats on top of that to get an odd +1 here or there so that it...

The Versus tests definitely reduces the effect of skills. In a flatter world, that probably means we should use a uncontested 11+mod as DC. Option 1: DC = 11 + mod (attacker wins ties) Option 2: DC = d20 + mod (defender wins ties) Here are the relative probabilities of success based on an...

The proof is in the mechanical details. It is certainly not difficult to imagine a Knight class AND a Knight theme AND a Knight background. The designers are unlikely to go that way, for the obvious reasons. But we could see a Heavy Fighter class, a Horseman theme, and an Noble background.

3e have magical weapon improvements and feats that did that. The Crit system worked quite well, although some people just did not care for Confirmation roll.

I voted yes for plate. There seems to be resistance to making heavy armor as relatively good as it should be, because it would blow the flat math -- I have seen that very argument made in older editions. Making its advantage be in related but orthogonal direction is a good thing. While we...

As a practical matter, themes can be thought of as thought of as sub-classes (although I think the designers are hoping to define themes more broadly than touching only one class as much as possible.) "Your class will suggest a theme, but we expect you to choose whatever theme you like. The...

"I could drop a Flamestrike on your head but I am going to buff myself instead, just for the RPing heck of it" does not say Paladin. I think that is obvious. Therefore a cleric who happens to be handy in melee with a good martial weapon is not a great choice. A lesser argument is that...

If we put our minds to it, it is not difficult to argue that every physical and mental stat improves both AC and hit points. Hit points are too abstract to seriously believe we can model anything precisely. What is important is that we get interesting enough differentiation and scaling. Where...

If we care about realism... There is no fundamental reason that shields should have a number of opponents limit and Dex not have the same. There is a practical limit on how many potential attackers you can keep you eye on, somewhere in the ballpark of 2 or less. To everyone else, you are...