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Looks like they are playing it humorously. That's probably a good idea.

Hah, Mike Mearls must lurk around here after all. :P I read the article as saying that 5e will support both XP and story-driven leveling. That seems quite sensible. Good job.

Skill challenges were introduced in Fourth Edition. The problem is that as they were presented there was something of a disconnect between the rules (roll a bunch of dice) and what they were trying to achieve (create cool, interactive non-combat encounters). Some of the later 4e adventures have...

I haven't heard the term before, and I read a fair amount of fantasy. 'High fantasy' to me means a 'Tolkien-esque' story. But I think that's just a convenient label for that genre of fantasy. I don't think that there really exists a continuum where we could sort every fantasy story into 'low'...

Finished at last! What follows is my final review:

Assuming they don't do something like require players spend XP for crafting, i.e. 3.x. If 5e uses XP strictly for leveling then indeed ignoring it should be easy. There's no reason why they shouldn't sketch out an optional 'XP-free' rule in a sidebar, though.

I'm sure 5e classes are not balanced against each other for PvP. Then again, NO EDITION OF THE GAME HAS EVER BALANCED CLASSES FOR PVP. In oD&D level 1 wizards didn't even have spells that did damage. How well do you think one would have fared against the party's fighter? Basically, the game...

Typically if you're not using XP you level up at natural breaks in the story - a rest between adventures or other milestones. You can even level at home: "Okay, great job guys, you've made it to the town! Everybody levels up. We'll pick up next week, everybody bring a level 5 character sheet."

OK, I gotcha. Well the other thing to think about is how often the party 'goes nova'. In an ideal situation, players should be using their dailies with an even frequency. In a four player party in four encounters you would expect one daily in each. In practice, that's not how it works. Players...

Wait, why would adapting 13A give you an extended rest after every encounter? I feel like I missed something here.

Wow, you wholesale gutted 4e! I'd love to hear further updates on how it goes. Do you find combat to be faster?

I may not have been clear, I meant to include (oD&D->2e) in my 'primordial soup'. Basically, anything before WotC, however you prefer to phrase that.

I am starting to strongly suspect that this is an edition-based preference. People who started with 3.x and up expect to encounter monsters they might conceivably beat, even if it might be a very challenging fight. People who started in the primordial soup of oD&D and its immediate successors...

What I worry about, I guess is balance. Obviously, deep down under the hood of 4e, there are assumptions about how many powers the players are going to have during any given fight. How much healing they have available is also a concern. 4e was designed with a certain pacing in mind. What kind of...

There seems to be an assumption in this thread that those of us running XP-less games (~50% if you believe the poll thread below!) aren't throwing difficult fights at our players. That is absolutely not true. When I run 4e I will throw monsters at the players that are as tough as they can be...

Whew! Finally finished Chapter 4! I didn't find Chapter 3 to be such a drag as some suggested, in fact I enjoyed learning about early German wargames and the like. But some parts of the fourth chapter, such as the lengthy section on the 1960's LA fandom shared fictional universe of Coventry...

As others have said, classes are just a design tool. Whether they meet the needs of a particular game depends on the game. The thing about classes in D&D is that they act as a language to communicate very specific ideas about characters which everyone understands. If I say my character is a...

If you want to discourage min-maxing, another idea you might steal from 13th Age is using the middle ability score to calculate defenses.

I'm too lazy to go back and find the appropriate posters to quote, but I think the idea was that there would be powers for each of the the weapon's attributes. So a morning star might give you a trip bonus, PLUS it would have reach, PLUS maybe something to do with blunt force.

I dunno. I'm not defending 5e. I'm not particularly excited about it myself. But the topic is why the 5e they are actually developing doesn't have weapon-specific powers. Given that they are shooting for a very traditional D&D, the kind of re-design that would have been required to accommodate...