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Some adventures are just better suited to some characters. I'm fine with that, as long as the DM tries to mix it up a bit e.g. if the last adventure was all undead where the Illusionist wasn't much use, make the next one all dumb brutes where she can have a field day. As DM I never feel...

My experience here has been mixed. I remember back in the 80s sitting around on numerous occasions with our DM and a few other players over far too much tea, shooting the breeze about all sorts of different rules ideas. Some great and fondly-remembered conversations but I'm not sure how many...

Two words. Party interdependence. Assuming the default style of play to be a group of characters going out on adventures (an assumption that doesn't seem too controversial) then doesn't it make sense to design in such a way as to encourage and support that style? If each character is good at...

Perhaps. I'm trying to separate chivalric (or anti-chivalric) knight types out from common fighters as I think there's class-design space for both. Brute-Brawler comes square under common fighter; they just choose 'open hand' as a weapon proficiency. As for ranged specialists, yeah, I have a...

They can all talk, they can (and, I hope, do) have memorable personalities and character quirks, they can all try to do things outside their normal sphere only they won't be very good at it. And yes, it helps if one accepts as a fact of life that not everyone is going to be involved all the...

Creating a setting from scratch to playable took me about a year of nowhere-near-constant effort, while working a full-time job. At a ve-e-ery rough guess I'd say it came in at well under 100 hours total. Most of the time-consuming busy-work lay in hand-drawing and colouring the maps...

Take a look at our system sometime - it's probably closer-related to TSR-era D&D than you realize. www.friendsofgravity.com/games then "commons room"; then "blue books" for (very setting-specific) player-side stuff and "DM stuff" for DM-side.

Change "Prevent" to "Embrace" there and you've got it bang on. :)

For us it's mostly Humans and Elves. Part-Elves used to be really popular but have tailed away dramatically over time. Dwarves are next, then Hobbits, Part-Orcs (who seem to have risen as Part-Elves have fallen), and Gnomes. Yes. In terms of what got played, Gygax (at least I think it was...

I've also found that parties without a Thief or equivalent can find themselves in trouble. No scout, no lock-picker, no climber - for lower-level parties in particular, it's a problem. Correct. In 1e Magic Users also got Remove Curse, I think. The way we play, curing during combat is very...

To me, the bolded is a big concern. Those extra 38 points should count for something, even if only that it takes 37 points of curing to get that Fighter from 1 to 2 hit points (after which cures work as normal) after the first cure gets him from 0 to 1.

Who's forcing anything? The class is what it is and does what it does, and if you don't want to play it then don't. If no-one wants to play it (which can be true of any class or role, depending on the specific group) then either you go without or recruit an NPC.

Never had Barbarian. Bard is a generic catch-all name for Skald, Minstrel, and various other direct equivalents. Paladin - you have a good point.

Vancouver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles seem to be doing OK and their situation is similar. That, however, is a much bigger issue. Australia's cities follow a similar pattern - nearly all of them are around the coastal rim - so again there's a vague real-world equivalent.

If you don't want to play a healer, choose a non-Cleric class. Or, from my list above, a War Cleric; who would heal like crap (but still be able to do it) but have better combat-oriented and combat-affecting spells. Clerics are what I see as being mostly a support class, a concept that has its...

Druids are replaced by Nature Clerics in the list I proposed upthread. "Druid" is a terrible name, in that both it and its root concept are tightly tied to a specific culture that only existed in a small part of our world. Monk-as-concept has the same problem.

This is one case where I really do think less is more. I've never been fond of multi-classing even in our own games, which go back to the 1e days. If there's a archetpye that the game really doesn't support that has room to build a halfway-balanced class around that isn't a jack of all...

Well, multiclassing as the WotC editions do it has to go as well.

From what I could gather, there seemed to be enough ways around niche protection in 4e that in the end there really wasn't very much. For example, look at all the classes that could heal in some form or other, which is supposed to be the Cleric's niche.

Every version of a swordmage I've ever seen has been someone's attempt to be able to have the features of both a Fighter and a Wizard, in one character. In other words, "I can do it all". Healing is the Cleric's hard-line niche. If it doesn't say "Cleric" somewhere in the class name then you...