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I think skill challenges are pretty much the only aspect in need of serious work. Everything else seems to work fairly well.

You can play CoC that way. That doesn't mean that you should.

I've been pondering these issues ever since I began developing Urbis. In addition to the issues mentioned above, here is another one which I consider to be fairly important: It must be digestible. I like lots of detail in a setting. I thrive on detail. But the average gaming group consists of...

As PCs advance in tier, the Raise Dead ritual becomes more expensive - 500 gp for the heroic tier, 5,000 gp for the paragon tier, and 50,000 gp for the epic tier. The meta game reason is, of course, that characters at higher levels become rich enough that the cost of the ritual would become...

Heh. The gnomish racial description for my own setting begins with the following: "Trust not the gnome. Do not listen to his witty banter. What he lacks in stature he more than makes up in malice for humankind. Do not take his money, for then he will cast you into debt and force you to sell...

I think Planescape was awesome, and it remains one of my all-time favorites. However, it should be remembered that Planescape was primarily intended as a setting in its own right, and that's not what was needed for the new edition. Instead, what was needed was a planar cosmology as an adjunct...

There is nothing wrong with the railroad - if you do it right. :D

While I would be interested in buying books with extended treatments of these planes, I think they work better as they are now - alien, alternate realms of reality threatening to invade the "normalcy" of the material plane. The fantastic aspects of the Feywild and the gloomy atmosphere of the...

Wizards in 4E are awesome. They get large-scale at-will area attacks. And as long as there are multiple enemies around, odds are that they will hit something, which is more than can be said of most other classes. Plus their AC and hit points tend to be good enough that it isn't instant doom if...

Ah, you are right - the Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night speech. How could I forget?

This trope provides all the justification I need: It's only a flesh wound! Player characters in D&D can keep going even after grievous injuries because they are basically action heroes, so there's no point looking at it all through the lens of realism.

One of my long-term plans is to build a random setting generator for the Arcana Wiki. The Random Character and Random Adventure Seed generators show the basic principle - it takes random elements to generate something larger.

It's a matter of preference, but personally I have made the experience that if you allow the PCs to drive the train off the tracks, the DM has as little clue as the players where the wagons will end up - which in my opinion makes it far more interesting for the DM. My Exalted campaign started...

Depends on the fantasy world, I'd say. Some of them allow the creation and use of gates, while others don't have them or make them a rare and uncontrollable natural phenomenon. Or maybe using them just too expensive for regular use. Besides, I feel that frequent use of gates is somewhat...

True. I've only said that I learned these lessons from my Exalted campaign, but there's no reason why they shouldn't be applicable to to Epic- and Paragon-tier D&D - or even on the heroic tier, if you start at a small enough scale.

You can have something resembling geopolitics. Before the era of fast communication and travel, news took months or years to get around, and ambassadors often didn't see their homelands for very long times. As a result, it was only really possible to maintain real diplomatic interaction with...

Running an Exalted campaign has been a real eye-opener for me. Here are a couple of suggestions from my experiences: - Make clear from the beginning that the PCs are powerful, and have real influence. This doesn't mean that they should simply slaughter through hordes of enemies with ease...

You mean, games which have only a single edition? :p

Heh. While I'm a scientist, ecology is not my field (I'm a physicist) - though I do have a passing interest in the field since my father is very passionate about it. For Urbis, I generally assume that all the creatures which look as if they couldn't have possibly evolved in a terrestrial...

That's a good question. So far, they have been good at putting all the information you need into the adventure books. I would assume that if they publish (for example) an adventure that partially takes place underwater, they will also reprint the relevant portions for underwater adventuring...