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This grognard is skeptical. "System Mastery" is just a lame excuse for poor design and needless complication. Any system half as complex as 1e/2e/3e will have inevitably have significant System Mastery elements, perhaps for good, perhaps for ill. On second thought, it could be that the...

I think 4e has a better infrastructure to deal with this issue than previous editions, because of the concept of Minions. I would just say normal horses or other standard mounts are only capable of giving a bonus to the rider or killing a Minion. That way you have the room to allow horse...

IMO removing the hard coupling between party viability and the Cleric class was not a good thing, but a great thing. Kudos to 3e. But we did have some new issues as a result. Besides the problematic Heal spell, any damage less death that was not an obnoxious and tenacious condition modifier...

My Wizard's philosophy is that once you hit middling levels it does not matter whether you are AC 10 or AC 20. If Mirror Image or Blur or Displacement fail you, you are gonna get hit always. Mage Armor? Who cares! Bracers of Armor are priced correctly...for other characters or monsters...

Which is the real problem. A play style tendency of either the players or DM tends to incrementally exacerbate the same tendency in DM or players. The problem is thereby self-reinforcing. If the PCs' are starting encounters buffed to "150% effectiveness" and waltzing over the opposition...

There are four ways to improve the performance of a DM: (1) Give general advice on how to run the game, coaching on creating adventures and encounters, useful rules of thumb for dealing with problems on the fly, tips on speeding up play, etc. (2) Provide material for campaigns or adventures --...

Group Initiative can be dangerous, especially if the NPCs take advantage of their group movement to the hilt. I think there is a middle ground where the DM can get significant speed up by moving 2-3 NPCs/Monsters at a time with little downside, especially if the DM is careful about not...

Not Anime. Warhammer. Actually I think people are missing the point. Warhammer has been doing the grotesque-scarred-steroid thing forever. Warhammer has been extremely successful for FLGS by virtue of generating regular sales of a high priced product from the average player. WotC is trying...

I get your drift. I have many fond memories of dungeon crawling as a Wizard carefully counting every last spell. "Do I use the last Fireball now, or hold onto this one big spell in case we get attacked at the end of the day when we are depleted?" Nonetheless there is a real pacing issue here...

I think that it the logical way to go. Just tell the players that it is assumed they have taken a quick breather unless the narrative tell them they have not (yet).

I will bite. From Lucas' actual first attempt at writing Star Wars... And then it blathers on in a convoluted plot about a young princess, with an aged retainer named Skywalker, and two kidnapped imperial bureacrats, try to carry her clan treasure of aura spice across a desert planet to...

Your fundamental premise is incorrect. Anyone can learn any skill. It so happens that each class has access to practically heroic levels of certain skills at a moderate costs, varying by class. But any mid-level PC could have, say, a +7 or better Tumble. That is none too shabby, and useful...

As he is making broad generalizations about the entirety of the rules, specifically what the rules say and do not say about things not in the rules, it is actually quite different than a personal opinion about how the 5% available to the public plays at his table.

This... ...is not fundamentally any different that this... It is entirely up to the whim of the DM to make these two be different. If the DM does not happen to have strong positive vibes about these kinds of things the 3e/4e "straitjacket" provides immensely more freedom than the old...

I propose that we can have the best of both worlds, in terms of suggested solutions. The PC gets a dumb +n bonus to certain actions when the companion is running on autopilot in the background, but it costs some kind of action for the companion to do the impressive stuff. Very advanced...

The prep time for baddies seems to be a common complaint. It is a solvable problem, but it is very far from solved for you out-of-the-box. The 15 minute a day problem: There are a number of variations on this theme. The part I do not like is that a party that is methodical at stacking up...

It was a balance problem is 1e/2e/3e for a defensive spell to both be plausibly be worth an Action after the initiative is rolled while yet not be overwhelming if a couple were stacked up pre-combat. I believe the 4e model is the spirit of making two completely independent decision points for...

The abstract mechanics only need emulate notable results in a manner that approximately as effective overall while minimizing overhead. For all we know, the PCs perceive Displacement to be running all the time, but they only feel certain it had a decisive effect every once in a while.

FWIW, I was an opposite case. I was very disappointed in the quality of the material in Sword & Fist, and Defender's of the Faith. They were promising supplements, but they were in desperate need of tweaking and rebalancing IMO. 3.5 brought me back as a regular buyer.

On the head. IMNSHO the product "glut" is not a sign of or cause of failure in 3e. It is a sign of success that happens to inevitably yield diminishing returns. I am grudgingly seeing the logic of a subscription model. Any number of the world's greatest campaign and adventure writers...