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I definitely recall many, many discussions of class balance back in 1e and 2e days, not just one or two. Heck, don't you recall the uproar about Unearthed Arcana and the barbarian and cavalier classes? And the proliferation of magic items and their importance to character power was also...

This would be balancing the mage from the non-mages by making them much weaker than the non-mages in battle. A lower levels since 2e days, that's pretty much how it went. You "earned" your unbalanced high level archmage by being so much weaker and more vulnerable than the other classes at...

I would definitely agree with that. An evocation, blast-em-all style wizard is likely the easiest type of mage to balance against the fighter. It's the illusion, divination, transportation and other spells that change the nature of the game world (as well as the immediate combat grid) that...

I suspect that the reason the designers have broken up the game into Heroic, Paragon and Epic tiers is to conceptually break up the various game-changing powers into each. So Heroic will have PCs with abilities you could imagine from a Conan or Fafhrd and Grey Mouser novel. Paragon will start...

I think that given the designer's statements and Mike Mearls' previous work, I do think that abilities such as you describe likely in the cards. I think that 4e will probably do a better job than previous editions at balancing classes at high levels and reducing the need for magic items. But I...

That you *can* do it is one thing. It's how effective that's going to be in the game world that's the question. Obviously, you can play even a "powered" fighter and simply refuse to use or take any of the powers because it doesn't match with your character conception. However, I don't see any...

I think as Stalker0 was implying, this still greatly favors the wizards, since out of battle they so completely outmatch the fighter. If they're equal in battle as well, that not very equitable. To date, D&D hasn't really worried too much about this, though.

I believe that indeed the majority of published (and from what I've seen homebrewn) campaigns from 1e-3e have an overrepresentation of arcane spellcasters at the high and epic levels. This was justly infamous in the Forgotten Realms, where the distributions often felt to me like a caste system...

Hmmm, the Bruce Cordell interview seems to indicate that familiarity is a considered factor for the 4e alignment system: "There'll be some tweaks... Even non-gamers know what a 12th level lawful good paladin is." My only fear in this is that they don't change it enough or eliminate it entirely...

While I think that you could publish a "3.75" edition that would be D&D, I wouldn't buy it until I heard some truly remarkable things about it. I didn't like the 3.5 edition because it was changed *just enough* to make it somewhat difficult to use 3.0 materials, but not enough to make it feel...

Thanks for the links. It's obviously been a fair amount of time, but I believe that when Paizo announced the Shackled City adventure path, my response was "Well, I hope they do a better job than the WotC adventure path" I do think that the term adventure path for a series of RPG adventures...

I'm pretty happy about the 4e announcements to date, with an exception for the half-elf's inclusion in the PH. I have no problem with the half-elf being in the game, but it shouldn't be taking up valuable page space in the race section from races that aren't just watered down versions of other...

True, although I have hopes that in 4e, specialists will actually be much better distinguished from their generalist cousins. I believe designers have already mentioned that there will be Necromancer and Illusionist classes, with spells and powers not to be found in the general wizard list. I...

I'm not too worried that they'll somehow wipe out Thay. It's one of the popular and iconic areas in the Realms. Not only do they feature prominently in each editions of the Realms, they are often used in the computer games based there. I figure at worst, they have Thay in the middle of an...

I hope the pace with which they're releasing this and the fact that they apparently had to split the second chapter into two parts doesn't indicate that they're not adequately staffed to release Dungeon articles. Hopefully, this is just first issue jitters.

Not much officially beyond what little there is in the Grand History of the Realms. SPOILERS BELOW (no black space since the entire topic is, by nature, a spoiler) Here's what I know: In the year 1385, the Spellplague was catalyzed by the murder of Mystra in Dweomerheart by Cyric and Shar...

The word tiefling doesn't annoy me half as much as "aasimar". At least tiefling rolls off the tongue reasonably well. To me, aasimar looks goofy, sounds worse and opens the entire race to no end of jokes at their expense. And, no, I don't think referring to them as the "Awesome-er" is going...

Thanks for the link, Beckett, that's the one I'm referring to. I wasn't sure about making a direct link, as I didn't want to set up some kind of forum vs. forum thing. Things seem to have died down, so no such worries, I think.

I also picked Cleric. It hits all the right spots: holy warrior, spellcaster, healer, foe to the undead and almost always easily tied into the gameworld. The plot hooks come easy that way.

Yep, although in the original series, they were a lot more sneaky, Evil Empire style enemies. The whole violent, honor-obsessed stuff didn't really start to set in until novels well after the original series, as I recall.