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Yeah, that sounds good to me. I don't really see the need for save DCs to scale, since the effects already scale. Why do higher level threats need to hurt a lot more and be harder to avoid/resist?

A lot of people celebrated that, I think. Wasn't critical enough. (I like max damage fine.)

Yeah, the OSR (though it wasn't called that yet) was definitely brewing when I left the scene, which was only a couple of years into 3.5. There was a lot of whinging about 3.5 cementing things which were left more vague in 3e, like the grid and minis.

Very minimally. A few do. But that talk seems to mostly have moved to the blogosphere in my absence.

Sign me up with the 'Skills dont complement D&D at all' brigade.

IMC, elves mature into adulthood when they decide to do so. Some are children for centuries, others for only a couple of decades, depending on how much they want to grow up. I like this, though.

I can see how that could be more convenient than a normal statblock if you made it and are intimately familiar with it. Otherwise, no not really.

What about degrees of success? Simply doing/thinking of doing a particular check will reveal a core clue, but the result of the roll itself reveals secondary clues?

Then why did you ask? Yes. D&D has very strong genre assumptions. I, like many, would call it a subgenre in itself. I can see how it would become a worse toolkit if you hacked it to bits. I wouldn't know, I've never had the need to hack it to bits. I switched to 3e when it came out, so I...

D&D does not require hacking. Anyway, what definition of hacking are you using? People have been using the word to describe everything from small tinkering and house rules to hacking together a new game, which is what meaning I--myself--personally have always put into the term. When I call D&D a...

Hacking a game to produce a different game is the foundation of RPG development. Pretty much all the early games were attempts at making D&D produce different results, which in turn got hacked to produce different games, which in turn got hacked to create different games. So playing a different...

From reading both of yours posts, I think that what you envision as a "hack", Iosue calls "configurability". By hack he means turning the 4e game into a different game–in the same way Dungeon World is a hack of Apocalypse World, but is still very much it's own game.

I haven't played or read any of PF's APs--so I cannot speak of their quality--but I know I'd generally pick any 1e module over anything produced by WotC. White Plume Mountain has definitely been the high point of our 4e game, and none of us were even born when it came out.

I guess, but people also can't agree on what constitutes "a setting". Calling D&D a "framework" is perhaps more accurate. Is D&D a framework or an app? Going by that I'd call D&D a framework on a similar level as Ruby on Rails/Django (and d20 = vanilla Ruby/Python).

The discussion seems pretty stuck on "What constitutes a toolbox?" I can't answer that question, but I can give some perspective on where I'm coming from. Earlier in the thread people referenced the publication of MMs as a reason why it's a setting, which struck me as odd, as when I think of...

I've always approached D&D as a toolbox, but never as an universal one. Paradoxically perhaps, I have treated it as a toolbox for D&D games. So I think it can leverage it's genre while firmly staying a toolbox.

Yeah. I know. We'll see how that goes. What I find most interesting is that the players were all gaming virgins before our campaign, yet have diverged this way--latched onto different features of my (somewhat muddled) narratively drifted simulationist DMing style.

Yeah, one of my players clearly prefers it as well, though she probably wouldn't agree with it if you asked her. She even gets frustrated at the other players for going off the rails, ruining "the DM's magnificent plan" (despite having it repeatedly explained to her that I encourage this...

I liked the -20 on Surprise, but my players didn't like it one bit. Mostly, they just thought the benefit of surprising someone should be greater. (They did seem to mind it less when they were the ones being surprised.)

When I buy physical products, I prefer to go to a store (or the store, seeing how the country has the one AFAIK). As others have described, I just prefer to hold things in my hands before purchase. That tends to be mostly gaming accessories, not books. But I don't do that often, as I mostly buy...