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I answered Yes to the poll, but I have not ever seen ridiculously overpowered wizards for reasons related to what you are talking about here. As an astute poster said in another thread observed, the Rest The Night Action is the most powerful action in the game, and because of the nature of...

It is not 4e players versus non-4e players issue. There is a fundamental design problem in 1e/2e/3e that a party without a cleric plays so differently from a party with a cleric. It is quite possible to trudge through dungeons without a Wizard, but the staying power of the party without a...

You make a number of general points I largely agree with. I think you are overstating the likely naivete of the 3e designers. I would say their effort here was quite successful in extending play into the higher levels, however they were under pressure to preserve the feel of these classic...

As a practical matter, any 9th level Wizard could easily have all the Mage Hand he could ever want. I think the basic idea is that there is no real reason to prevent, say, a 12th level wizard blaster specialist from casting 3 Magic Missiles forever. In 3e he could just have bought a cheap wand...

If somehow knowing someone is a "Wizard" (11th level Magic User in 1e) tells you nothing at all about his actual abilities, then there is no point in calling that person a Wizard. He is just a Generic Hero of Biggish Level and the titles are vanity item that would be campaign dependent, not a...

Exactly. My character can call himself "El Gato, the Infiltrator Extraordinaire" if I want. For example, in 3e, whether I build him as Rogue10 or Clr5/Rog5 is a player decision, with pros and cons. Why exactly does anyone feel that Ftr10, Wiz10, Clr10, and Rog10 should all be equally valid...

I disagree with the premise of the OP. I think trying to accomplish the proposed goals would just create the least liked aspects of 3e and 4e in spades. Players generally do not want to do an immense amount of crunching to figure out what their PC is good at. Yes, there should be a healthy...

Very early RPG designers could play the "if only you played the game correctly (the way I do after 900 hours of practice), then you wouldn't have these problems" card. It is not 1985 any more. Now I would say that certain assumptions on the part of the designers are simply not what I should...

Do not tinker. Do. There is no tinker. A rather disappointing level of commitment to a fundamental design question that has been obvious before, during, and after 3.0. Tinkering? Why just tinker? <rant> The cleric has been a boring cardboard cutout of every other cleric since forever...

For a one or few session adventure I think rolling is a fine thing. I find no attraction is investing more time or effort into a PC that is markedly different from my preferences for no good reason. Rolling for stats made enough sense when proto-D&D was created because every adventure was soft...

I think B is very achievable. Most enchantments, illusions and battlefield control do not directly defeat an enemy. They make some of the enemies easy pickings for your Fighter friends. My off the cuff proposal would be: (1) Eliminate SR from the game. (2) Lower the default direct damage...

I find it interesting to have an explicit design goal that the Rogue may be better off bidding her time for the Big Hit from behind. It has never quite worked out for any version of the Rogue IMHO. Not that it could never be done, but most people could not figure out how to run their Rogue...

Yet Gandalf employs simple trickery to help Bilbo and friends out of a few jams. And he says quite plainly that if not for Bilbo's warning he would have likely been overcome in the cave by, oh, a measly handful of random goblins. Other than somehow surviving (for at least a while) toe-to-toe...

There is no logical reason to believe a new D&D game specifically tailored to youngsters will attract the young any more successfully than the 50 RPGs on the shelves of my local game store. What the D&D name brings is the goodwill of a large already existing community. That same community is a...

As I see it, it is not fundamentally a question of the overall power of the Wizard, but rather the relative efficiency of spells against very different kinds of threats and how this creates the "texture" of wizardry in the game. As a design challenge, this sort of boils down to completely...

Fighters and even monsters can have bows. But part of the problem is that Wizards have too easy a time figuring out how to avoid the swords. It is one of the reasons I am against Generalist Wizards as a sacred cow -- certain reliable tactics are too obvious and (almost) always accessible.

I think you put your finger on the underlying contradiction. Fighters hate being attacked by Wizards. Wizards hate being attacked by Fighters. Now if my Fighters can attack your Wizards and my Wizards attack your Fighters, I win. At face value, that sounds pretty reasonable. Where it...

The defaults systems are intended to keep it simple for figuring out how to "remove a unit" from the battlefield. Tactical mitigations are a fabulous way to create a complex tactical system. D&D is not the system for this. Why not just give your Fighter more HPs? We want your PC to be at...

I like your idea here. I would define a creature as "free" if it is not threatened and has not been attacked in the last 1 round. Keep it simple. I do not feel the need to add many rules to fix the problem. I think adding just enough incentive to make the optimal tactics not obvious is good...

I have a pet peeve that existed in multiple editions, I would like to see "corrected". Fat chance. But I am going to speak my peace. When facing nonmagical but physically dangerous opponents, whom do you call first? The Wizard. When facing a steeped in magic dangerous foe, whom do you call...