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If they change the Eladrin backstory I will be SO MAD

I have updated my EVOLUTION OF THE GNOME timeline to include Deities and Demigods and Roger E. Moore's all-important write-up in Dragon #61:

It's possible you're reading something here I'm not saying - that Fighters should be underpowered or that all they should be able to do is hit things. That's not it at all. But I think that early on in 4e the answer to the question "How do you make non-casters interesting?" was "Give them a...

I'm thinking of, yes, 13th Age's approach. You can sketch out a 13th Age battlefield on the back of a napkin, or use salt shakers and spoons. You could have a combat where one player is chasing a monster several blocks away from where other players are battling some thugs. All this is possible...

I remain a bit curious, in an academic way, why 4e has always elicited such visceral responses from some people. I mean, it's a set of rules. At the end of the day if those rules really aren't working for you, you can choose not to use them. That's what people have been doing since Greyhawk came...

I dunno, people have been playing D&D fighters for a long time and acquiring NO powers as they level and it seems like it's been okay. It seems like for certain classes this would be acceptable. And I should say that I'm not recommending this for EVERY class. Casters still need to pull new...

To add to this nuts-and-bolts description, part of the idea is that there will be a negotiation between the player and the GM as to whether a background should apply and if so how. This process forces the player to expand on their character's backgrounds and is also a lot of fun. It's also less...

You're looking for 'Backgrounds'. They replace skills in 13th Age, and they're kind of cool. Check out chapter 2.

Agree with this. 4e could have used a way to hand-wave less consequential encounters. When EVERY encounter has to be laid out on a grid and takes 4+ minutes to play you have a recipe for long, drawn-out sessions. I ditched 'random encounter' tables very quickly once I started running 4e.

Apparently you never got bogged down sifting through lists of hundreds of feats, like I did!

You aren't disagreeing with what I wrote, or at least you haven't yet. I did not assert that stat blocks gave any information about monster ecology or origins. I'm saying that the mechanics of the stat block gave a good job conveying the 'feel' of that monster in combat. And believe it or not...

It has both. You never heard of 'interceptions' or 'pop free'? Obviously 13A abstracts its combat a little more than 4E, but it does still very much allow for thoughtful, tactical combat played out on a map. And holy cow, those combats go so much faster!!!

4e was the edition where when the table ran into a rules issue, I as the DM felt very comfortable coming up with a resolution off the top of my head. And then when we looked it up later, my resolution was often the one in the book. Once you grok'd the system, it was incredibly logical.

Given that Rob Heinsoo went on to work on 13th Age which basically picks up all these ideas and runs with them, I would say that he absolutely 'knew what he was doing' when he was working on 4e. Although 13A certainly benefits from the 'test bed' that was 4e (for instance, having classes that...

13th Age is a definite improvement, although I could still imagine an even more interesting approach. I would like to see something that features really big, epic spells that require components to cast. Of course, it's possible I'm just wishing that someone would graft Ars Magica onto my game...

Yup, this.

The only thing that that was an example of was desperation...

When I first read about skill challenges I was like "What an incredible amount of potential this has!!! Now I just need to completely rework how they're doing it." For many people in the 4e playing community, SCs got the wheels turning, not so much as a finished idea that was teh awesomes but...

It's possible that the books were rushed out before they were ready, but I also think that what 4e was trying to do was so radical that it was always going to take a while to get right. AEDU was new, the monster system was new, skill challenges were new, balanced classes were new... There was a...

In a memorable event in a Gamma World one-shot, one of my players randomly acquired the ability to imitate sounds. Facing a bunker full of heavily armed Badders, he decided to imitate a badger in heat. An improbably successful skill check later, he had cleared out half the guards. So, add...