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As I said before, this may be a good time for an auction!

To be honest, I'm not particularly interested in building my namesake even in a system better suited for it (chose this handle years ago), and in a system like D&D that's not well-suited for it, the value of time spent trying to do such difficult things is significantly less. That's for a PC...

Righteous Brand doesn't need 20 Strength to work. 18 would be plenty. However, when you play a Heavy Armor class you don't have to worry about adding a secondary stat to AC, so there's a lower opportunity cost to an 18 pre-racial primary stat (and a high primary stat increases to-hit and...

That is very good! I don't think I realized that it's until end of your next turn, so the bard benefits from it as well. If you can focus fire effectively, that's a lot of to-hit bonuses. However, it doesn't set up characters for "nova" type turns in the same way. Battle Clerics and Warlords...

In a melee heavy party, a Battle Cleric that starts with 20 Strength and takes Righteous Brand has the best leader at-will by far. If you're at low heroic and are using mainly at-wills, it's going to be hard for any other leader to compete. That said, by Paragon tier characters are at their...

There's little "protection against magic" in 4e in the first place. This is a big change from 3e in this regard. If you choose an RP disadvantage ("I'm a general who has been exiled from his homeland. He returns to overthrow the king he once served, and is a hated and wanted man"), it should...

If you're running KoTS, take a look at Eleven Foot Pole: January 2009, which has great commentary on the adventure.

Then you can create a measure of how well each build does based on the results of the encounters. However, that could be very difficult, so maybe just categorize them according to "Warden party did better; Fighter party did better." To get the margin of error down to a reasonable 3% level, run...

Skill Challenges are bad. Here's one example from E3: Prince of Undeath: http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-rules/269204-e3-prince-undeath-final-skill-challenge-bad-spoiler.html "How do I build [X character]?" doesn't work well in general. If you want to build my namesake, try a...

Direct mechanical benefits probably aren't a good idea. If you don't mind having some of the other classes, saying "I'd like people to play [these classes] and stay away from [these other ones] unless you feel really strongly about it" might do the trick on its own (e.g., get you 4 out of 5...

Sometimes a system being house-ruled more is a sign that's it's better, not worse. For example, my 3.X D&D group didn't like tracking XP. So we did away with it and players gained levels when appropriate. However, since XP was involved in magic item creation and the casting of certain spells...

There's no equivalent for the Fighter to that extra Con damage when in Guardian form hammer, particularly in heroic. Of course, there's no equivalently good item for the Warden. That item is just much too good. Crushing Guardian is a bit stronger than it should be, and Crippling Crush is...

No. Proposals to fix the math that include increasing your highest two ability scores more than they do now suffer from two problems. 1) This increases AC for light armor characters (who boost Dex/Int), which means that these characters' ACs are both too high relative to the monster's scaling...

Is this actually the case? From the PH feats section

For changes over time, here's the math on the raw effect of levels, stat increases, and enhancement bonuses of magic items. Over 29 levels, from a starting level 1 character (no magic items) to level 30: To-hit, AC, and Fort/Reflex/Will gain +21 from levels/enhancement bonuses. Assume you...

I agree with everything (as usual), except Normative statements aside, items that grant untyped damage bonuses aren't exactly rare. Great game design at work! ;) Edit- compared to Footpad's Friend, a similar but significantly weaker item, what's most surprising about the Maw of the Guardian...

2d6+12. As I pointed out above, he was double-counting the item bonuses to damage (and the Talon amulet requires combat advantage anyway, which isn't reasonable to assume at 100% on a build like this).

Rain of Steel doesn't need to hit, and the [W] gets bonus damage from several factors. Not that Form of Mountain's Thunder isn't awesome Brash Strike only grants CA to one enemy. It also gets +2 to hit, which means that DPR from Brash Strike will certainly be higher than DPR from Weight of...

I'm not sure why this is a problem in practice. Form of the Winter's Herald and Form of Mountain's Thunder both seem better than any Warden level 5 daily. This Warden's accuracy is only average (+10 to hit) for a 6th level character. Characters with higher attack bonuses will get more out of...

Item bonuses from Iron Armbands and Talon Amulet don't stack. Crippling Crush is an incredibly strong feat; hadn't seen that before. Maw of the Guardian is pretty awesome as well. I think this is about the degree of optimization. This warden has taken all 4 feats (Crippling Crush...