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I had my best 3.5 E experience (by far) using core rules from levels 1 to 17. Later attempts to use more complicated rules sets (by including supplemental material) simply did not work out as well.

Ah, okay, if they are altering all of the ways to get save penalties to being for a single save then I am a bit more sympathetic to the group that wanted the Orb of Imposition to be an immediate interrupt (rather than needing to be declared in advance).

They also seem to have changed the Tiefling's racial power. I admit that the volume of errata, even if well founded, is about to be a serious issue for me. I dislike needing to look things up in multiple places just to make sure the rule was not changed. The Rules Compendium may assist with...

Wouldn't that bring back the issues of lockdown, to some extent? After all, if you have a narrow window of saves (by stacking penalties) then a critter needs to get lucky twice in a sequence of rolls if the power is applied after the roll is made (and it could be the case that the first roll is...

I agree that the dichotomy, itself, is false. If your social contract includes letting the dice fall where they may then fudging would destroy fun even more rapidly than anything else. When I DM such a group, I generally roll dice out in the open so that players may savor the anticipation of...

I was thinking about this and it occured to me that I had a real life example of this back in the early 1990's. It was D&D 2E and I was playing a Paladin and I was about level 3, iirc (might have been 4). For various reasons, the character got separated from the party and was having...

Yes. If the "rules as written" contain an outcome that would make the game completely unfun, I would consider the a priori decision not to include that option in the die roll to be the same as simply discarding it should it arise. So if the entire party dies without ever knowing what happened...

I would consider not rolling to be equivalent, in this case. When using a screen, I will also occasionally roll dice that have no meaning so that I don't telegraph that something unusual is about to happen when I do roll. Or just roll a "dummy die" and let it go. However, there might be...

Here it might be remarked that the use of fudging in a story based camapign (using my operational definition) definitely follows a "more is less" philosophy. Having the party all die from an unfortunate die roll (ending the campaign) when the players acted in a reasonable way could be such an...

I agree, but I would argue that, at the limit, one falls into one of the two camps. If you aklways let the dice fall where they may then you have decided to make the combat challenges dictate where the plot goes next. This is not a bad way to play (and if I accidentally implied anything of the...

It was so much intended to suggest that blends are not possible so much as to point out that the focus of the combat encounters does a lot to determine if fudging makes sense. If your game is story focused and the outcome of the combat leads to a horrible anticlimax then everyone will probably...

My theory (and it is only a theory) is that there are two broad approaches to D&D and that, depending on which one you use, the issue of fudging is very different. The first is a wargame approach where the DM creates a series of challenges to overcome. Here fudging the dice looks a lot like...

True, but I think that the issue also involves synergy. For example, there are powers that involve infliciting a penalty to hit (Psions, for example) that are low level and easy to use. In the d20 version of the game, a -4 penalty is harsh but still leaves a functional opponent (say if it was...

I wonder if the sweet spot for 4E would be E10 (10th level characters) rather than 6th?

While I have not run it, I suspect that 4E (out of the box) addresses many of the issues that E6 was addressing (high level spells such as fly and teleport, for example).

Only insofar as they can boost their caster level somehow. I can think of a few ways to get a +1 boost but that seems to be about it unless I am missing something pretty obvious. Most prestige classes (the usual trick) are either too high of a level or you can only get the beginning of the...

I have owned at least one edition of it and would be interested in reading the latest (5th edition) if I came across a copy. Never quite remember to order it (and gmaing stories rarely carry the exotic games these days). I would play it in a heartbeat as I liked the ideas behind the system...

This got even more complicated if you wanted to be sure that party wealth per level would be respected and used appropriate numbers of lower power items rather then a few higher power items to speed up the process. I also find DMing gets a lot harder when the players get massive mobility...

It depended on the group. I once played a F7/MU11 in the G/D/Q series (Queen of spiders supermodule, as it was later called) and it was a dreadful mistake as the level limits were crippling. In another campaign (in a city 1000 miles away), I saw a 1/2 Elf F/MU/C who was over 20th level in all...

My view has to do with the complexity of role playing games. Modern RPGs have fairly complicated mechanics and figuring them out can take a fair amount of time. This can act as a barrier to entry. When much of the market uses the d20 riles, they become extremely familiar and ensure that the...