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A few pages back there were a bunch of posts on the OP's assumption that 4E "failed." So, yeah, it depends on what you think is the criteria for success, and there seems to be about as many of them as there are participants in the thread. So here's mine, the way I think 4E failed in the...

Really. It's a very useful term in describing game preferences and there's no equivalent. I understand 4E fans are sensitive to the term because it explains why lots of folks didn't care for their game, but that does not eliminate its usefulness. It's a useful idea when discussing games in...

None of those compel action. They all create consequence for PC action or inaction. Consequences are part of the world and withing a DM's area of control. What the PCs do about it is supposed to be entirely within the player's control. This may seem a trivial point but it's really important...

It's also human nature to reject criticism of things one likes, and this is frequently done by attacking the basis of the criticism, even when it is perfectly legitimate. Especially when it is perfectly legitimate, I should say, when the thing being criticized is indefensible. I thought that...

ToTM combat seems a bit quicker, but that may be because I only use it for very simple combats. I switched to battlemaps in about 1982 and never looked back. The level of detail presented on the battlemap is greater than what I can easily carry in my head, so battlemaps make for more...

It eats you. ... okay, I suppose it depends on the pact. This would be an interesting addition to the patron contract; it would need to be balanced out by some benefit though.

Just finished a David Weber "Honorverse" book, shadow of somebody-or-other. It gets a B, like the other ones I've read. Fun read but the action drags a bit, and the politics are a bit too left for my enjoyment. Next up is probably "Developing Management Skills," a textbook I've been meaning...

I haven't actually had a chance to play 5E yet, but the one point that stands out to me from the OP is that skills are weaksauce. This stands out the most to me in thief skills like climbing. Climbing, pick pocket etc used to be the thief's niche, but it looks like that part of niche...

I read a Dragonlance book where Tasslehoff and the dwarf visited the Kender capitol. They were pretty much all like Taslehoff.

Very cool idea. I'm imagining the players figuring out what's going on after they arrive near the middle of the city. This is the kind of image that causes nightmares.

I've found they're a lot of fun, both as a DM and as a player. Fluffwise, I pretty much insist that they originate on Krynn. But it's easy enough to imagine a kender borrowing a plane-traveling device and playing with is, such that either the kender or his whole village end up in another world.

Honesty's a bid deal to me. I don't lie. I don't fudge either, but if I did and was unable to duck the question I would admit it.

I like my own. I know that's not much help, sorry. I'll do two things to make my campaign worlds ethnically diverse. First, I'll map out wide swaths and designate the dominant group in each. Second, I like to create ethnic groups by combining several real and/or fictional ethnic groups...

As a DM I love kender. It's a fair amount of effort generating dramatic encounters to make things exciting for the players. When there's a kender in the group, the players generate their own drama and I get to relax and watch for once.

That hasn't stopped a lot of other actors though ...

In my D&D campaign, zombies are always artificially created mindless automatons, so you won't find any wild packs of them running around. The closest you might see is a group that's hostile because they were ordered to "go that way and attack whomever you encounter" and were never retrieved...

I can understand that point of view even if I don't entirely agree with it. There are a lot of components of D&D that I find unintuitive, stilted, artificial, clunky, and so on and so on. Frex, IMO: Hit points suck as a mechanic. What the heck are they anyway? Classes are a straightjacket...

There's a tradeoff though. The more consistent and predictable you want outcomes to be, the more rules you need in the book. You can quickly get to the point where there are too many rules to easily remember, too many to thoroughly playtest, and too many unpredictable interactions between...

That's a very good point, and I think it would work, but it would cause other problems. WotC would need to continue to support 3E, as its the current edition of D&D, and the new not-4E at the same time. I expect this would split the fanbase much as it did, just with less animosity. With a...

Sure there are non-D&D games that succeeded. But they are a tiny fraction of the total number of games produced. And a lot of those obscure games are pretty good! Just percentage-wise, the chances of a no-brand 4E are poor. Add in the lack of differentiation from vanilla-generic D&Dish...