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The more disposable the PC is, the fewer the downsides and greater the upsides to rolling. The more invested the Player is in the PC, the greater the potential downsides* to rolling. * A "potential downside" is not necessarily a downside you will see at your table. It depends a lot on the...

My personal preference is rolling for disposable PCs that I will play for 1 to 3 sessions, but I strongly lean towards point buy for long campaigns. Someone in our group found "Roll 4d6 by cards no replacement" on the internets, and it seems to find the sweet spot -- it has enough randomness...

From the POV of typical day to day running of a campaign, I agree with the thrust of your argument. I think there is some value in price lists as an aid to the DM, because rarity is a very coarse measurement. It can be easier on the DM to have a finer measurement to lean on when s/he might...

Players rightly complain when the DM is always making lame excuses why the price is the price but it is much higher for you if you ever want to buy anything -- which is the course of action some seem to suggest. To use your analogy, often the dealer will accept a lower price than the sticker...

The SRD prices are, frankly, not very well done. The interesting items, especially the multifunction ones, are vastly overpriced. That is my takeaway from the Big Six discussion. The Magic Item Compendium shows how interesting stuff could be made available for less than sky high prices...

Agreed. I think too many people argue a False Choice fallacy, as if gold is either only for castles & whores XOR we must have corner Magick Marts. There is a lot of territory in between those extremes. IME the better DMs saw dangling the possibility of buying that one item your PC covets by...

I agree with your take. Unless you are planning on a splatbook per quarter like the 3e days of old, how much staff producing content do you really need? You bring on people for a year or two contract if you have a big release of a new campaign world, then let them go. It is not a business...

It is rather convenient to blame Blume and Williams, and they do certainly deserve a lot of blame, but Gygax made his share of mistakes, too. But to your latter point, 8 people who are full time making new product is not such a small number, if they are insulated from the day to day hassles of...

It is not so much that it is impossible to believe, but that the reasoning backing these assertions up is so skewed and one-sided as to be worthless. The same market inefficiencies that result in the best offer for my "+1 sword nominally priced at 2000gp" being 200gp today, also suggest that...

The 5e Core rules (PHB + DMG) word count must be 40% ballpark higher than 3e, so it is a little questionable to claim one is much "lighter" than the other. 2e + many splats and 3e + many splats are both undeniably heavy games. But if we really cared about a lighter experience, 2e and 3e Core...

It is as if Randall Munroe peeked into my window late one night.

I agree in spades. Regardless of the intention, the net effect of fumble rules as most people apply them is to severely punish characters who earn their paycheck in melee. Simply giving a 5% fumble chance to spells that require aim is not sufficient balancing factor. In the heat of combat...

Agreed. The necessity of not rolling is driven by the flat math. Specialists are no longer allowed to be good enough to know they will beat a drooling Wis 3 Commoner1, so an avalanche of opposing dice obliterates the value of their skills.

Turquoise bicycle shoe fins actualize radishes greenly!

I think your description points to both the strength and weakness of the module. The rub is that such an unusual module was often enough completely misunderstood by the DM (especially if that DM is an 11 year old, 12 year old, or 13 year old). Over the years, I have come to appreciate that...

IMHO, Fumble rules generally clash with the high fantasy heroic tone most players expect from D&D. Furthermore, there seems to be a skewed obsession about adding complexity and more random swings to what is already the most dice intense and swingy-est aspect of the game. Missing an attack is...

3e system of trade goods 100% and magic items have a 50% sale price works well enough, for most groups. Because PCs are approximately never buying trade goods or even gems in an amount is important a "100 gp pearl" is a pearl you can sell or buy for 100 gp. Going into more detail is going to...

Those "inconsistencies" are design decisions in the chassis of the system. That you are only now noticing them does not prove that DoaM is wrong, only that thinking about DoaM makes them more obvious... to you. I am not a fan of DoaM, mostly for flavor reasons. But I do not think your...

Okay then, I will not comment on that game. I will make a blanket statement that if even a single member of the ambushing party tips off their intended victims, then the ambush is spoiled, and there is no Surprise. Any other kind of ruling is simply idiotic. You can divide your would be...

Then they should have magically controlled those wyverns to attack from surprise. Too bad they spoiled the ambush by bumbling forward and tipping off the PCs.