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It is to laugh. Let's see it. Quite honestly, the AOO is the least of the issues. Um, dude, they already can do that. Melee touch attacks are keyed off of strength -- whether they should be or not! -- and include base attack bonus, which adds up to an ogre having a +8 on his touch attack...

Bwa what? A dwarf fighter who's focused on axes and always wields and axe has the ability, due to his class proficiencies, to walk over and pick up any other martial weapon -- like a rapier -- and start using it with no difficulty. That's kinda silly. In 4e I'm hoping (and it looks like this...

Yeah... anyone who is surprised or concerned by the fact that they're making changes to the last minute... hasn't ever worked on a big project before, of any sort. There are always changes right down to the wire in everything -- books, computer programs, construction specs... In publishing...

I have my own ideas about that, which I'll get into below. I'm feeling pretty good about the weapon system. They haven't pointed out any great weaknesses of the existing system, which suggests they aren't going to change it much -- but just add special abilities that let weapon-focusing...

Well, that's really just an expansion of the sweet spot concept. When you're in that 'sweet spot' of levels, hits generally don't drop you to -10 with one shot. With the rare exception of a bad crit, a hit that drops you will normally take you to the middle of the negatives... unless you were...

Hehe, well, actually no coins or dice produce any given value exactly -- Interestingly, probability demands that it be also exceedingly rare to come up precisely the predicted value, no matter how many tests you run. A fair coin flipped X times will almost always be a few Heads more or less...

I totally agree with everything you said. I don't want to remove dice from the game -- but as was previously mentioned, they're not really reducing the uncertainty so much as evening it out across all levels. Really, by reducing the "solo monster" thing to monsters that are built to be solo...

Eh... I still think any rolling differences from edge-rounding would be pretty minor and not terribly obvious at the table. I mean, even a 5% difference would still only manifest as a single extra 20 out of twenty rolls. I put "lucky dice" and such things down to reporting bias* rather than...

I have a player a bit like that. He's not a cheater. He's just lazy -- his character sheet is such a chicken-scratch that HE can't read it half the time, let alone ME. His dice are sort of a white-silver swirl...with white numbers. (WHO MADE THOSE?!) I sit next to him, so I know he's not...

Somebody earlier mentioned that these are probably experenced players and thus able to avoid the pitfalls of TPKs. That's an interesting point and probably correct, but there could be more to it. I recall reading an article on the WOTC website a while back, about the nature of the TPK -- the...

It's not madness at all, and I suspect there are many people who totally agree with you (and me). It's not a black and white situation. You aren't required to hate vanilla if you like chocolate. And while 4e excites me because it seems like a lot of things I disliked are being fixed and a lot...

I never really saw that happening, myself. As a meleeist, I just *accepted* that some enemies will be weapon-resistant, and I didn't try to carry around a golf club for every situation. I'd get my main weapon with one special material -- MAYBE -- and just assume that if I meet a golem or...

You are correct. In the original Jack Vance books, wizards have to study their spellbooks to memorize a spell, then when they cast it, that knowledge (because it's arcane knowledge) pulls itself out of their mind as the spell goes from being Thought to being Reality. Vancian casting means you...

The most recent Podcast talked about this a bit. There are two measures that combine when you deal with use limits. First is power -- in general, at-will powers are (duh!) a little weaker, while encounter is stronger, and daily use is strongest. At the same time there's a second calculation...

But on the other hand, I dislike the idea of a darkness spell just sucking away all light and making the game into Blind Man's Bluff. My preference is that a Darkness spell reduces the light within its radius by one step -- bright becomes shadowy, shadowy becomes total darkness. As an added...

Maybe I'm misguided, but my memory of the Podcast is that monsters don't have any sort of formulae, but rather a set of charts by role and level that give you a range of what is acceptable. So for a pit fiend, you would go to the Elite table, find the "Soldier" column (which means you're...