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I have serious doubts about any game support effort hinging on public input, especially one intended to harvest the "best" ideas from them. I think Ryan Dancey was fundamentally wrong about OGL encouraging iterative improvement of the game through public input, and I don't see the idea of an...

Using that reasoning, all defenders are terminally MAD. If paladins can't dumpstat Constitution, then plainly fighters can even less afford to do so with one fewer surge as a base. Going from 10 Con to 14 Con costs a touch less than a quarter of your total stat points. While I don't think you're...

In my experience, Strength-based paladins have got no use at all for Constitution. It doesn't help their Fortitude save, they've already got 11 surges right out of the gate, and a piddling handful of HP at 1st level means nothing. I'd seriously consider dumpstatting it to 8 if Dex or Int weren't...

I do think it's best to drop much effort to be historically realistic about medieval warfare. An enormous amount depends on where and when you're trying to simulate, and some basic military tropes just don't translate back from WWI very well. First off, medieval societies could not sustain a...

There's no indication that the power requires a fly speed to begin with, so my interpretation would be that if it raises your fly speed by 4, you gain Fly 4.

I think people are selling Unnatural Vitality way too short. Consider what happens every time you drop below 0 HP- you go prone and you drop what you're holding. Some class abilities might well turn off too, like Swordmage Aegis. Even if the healer smacks you immediately thereafter with a...

Are you equipping a staff off the Weapons category, or off the Implements? I understand there seems to be a difference between the two.

A few months ago, jdrakeh came up with an entertaining short-term RPG design contest. The details are here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/247021-great-conjunction-rpg-design-contest.html#post4590958. I pitched in a contribution called Eightfold, a retro-inspired, fairly...

I think it's worth drawing a distinction between gaming sexism as an instrumental problem and gaming sexism as a moral failing, because the answers are going to be different for each. It's perfectly possible to make a devil's bargain with your content, pushing the material that is most likely to...

I think it's worth reminding people that sandboxing and a simulationist viewpoint do not automatically get paired together. There is no law that says that the moment you tell your PCs to just do whatever they want to do in your world, you must then have a formalized system for simulating the...

Yet here we are, approximately eight days after release, and the pirates still have not released the full book to casual pirating sites. WotC has decided that there is simply no money whatsoever in PDFs, and that any degree of cash they are making off of them at any point in a product's...

Yes, they have. It took the pirates four days to even begin getting parts up, and tomorrow's DDI update will quite likely put the crunch into the Compendium and the Character Builder before the full book is available. As it stands right now, the vast majority of people who preordered or who have...

I think WotC's perfectly willing to write the long tail of their PDFs off entirely. Why? Because the only long tail PDF customers are those who A) declines to pirate and B) demand electronic format and C) are not satisfied to buy the book... and these customers can then be led to the handy DDI...

They bought themselves four days at a minimum and probably two more until the whole book hits the major sites. That's significantly more time than I was expecting, and I can't imagine WotC isn't pleased at the results. Given the former condition of zero-hour PDF piracy, this is a great outcome...

If an ostensibly expert navigator of darknet private file exchanges is capable of finding only about 25 people sharing an unverified file more than 24 hours after the book officially went on sale, I believe the analysis that WotC will draw from this is "We won." Of course the file will appear...

I've been watching the major sites, and there's still no sign of it. If a pirated PDF is out there, people are being remarkably discreet about exposing it. I'm not implying that you're being deceitful in saying you've seen it, but let's just say that it's much easier to rename a Make Money Fast...

I'm watching, myself, just out of interest in this precise question. I'll bet it hits a major site within two days, since it's a fairly major release hot on the heels of the PDF policy kerfuffle, and I'm sure someone out there is eager to "stick it to the Man". I'm betting it'll have no...

But WotC's already made clear that they're not interested in providing zero-hour PDFs that can be de-watermarked before the first box of hardbounds have come off the UPS truck. This model would functionally replicate the exact same system they've just discarded as a losing game. It's the old...

Okay. How? How do you arrange it so that purchasing a hardbound book gets you a free PDF without significant danger of that code getting ganked before you get to enter it? If you think this PDF fuss is a black eye for WotC, how do you think they'd look after the first few dozen customers start...

Oddly enough, this idea was exactly what WotC originally wanted to do, until they realized that they could think of no feasible way to accomplish it. You've called them out on an idea they've openly stated they have no idea how to do right. Arguments such as this, saying that WotC would salve...