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During the times I've posted regularly, I've been an ardent defender of 4E since it's release. There are some things I don't like about it. Some (most?) of these things are features of the game that I have in the past defended as being good. 1) Leveling as a pacing mechanic. Leveling is not...

So far it's working out fine. People are using their dailies often because they can only get the most possible uses out of them by using them. I did the math on recharge 5 6 per encounter and it does result in the use of dailies that is higher than the assumed 4 encounters per extended rest...

This is a perfect example of what I was talking about before. No "one way" that has to be followed to get to the objective. Sounds like a fantastic encounter that drove things forward. It resulted in action rather than stopping play. You had a means of bypassing the puzzle and even getting...

I've run games where death saves only reset at extended rests. It was alright and it didn't really have the PCs turtling, mostly because I almost always structure things so they can't just take as much time as they want. Lately I've been trying to get rid of extended rests as much as possible...

Not everyone has the goal of immersion for their play. Just like not everyone has the goal of overcoming challenges. Another approach is that the group as a whole contributes to the intelligence of the smartest character stat-wise. So if you have a 20 Int and the group discusses it, the...

It's definitely been moved away from over the last ten years or so. There's been a lot of trashing on anything that can be called metagaming. People often get in a huff when you say things like metagaming can be good. Or that it's okay to emphasize the G in RPG rather than the RP. As if a...

I think the best way is to get competent with it. I think locking it away is basically accepting mediocrity. Or turtling to protect oneself from a perceived repeat of a previous negative experience. Not every mode of play is for everyone, but I found that engaging in direct challenges to the...

I think the best strength of challenging the players directly is that they can't coast through the session. In 4E, the encounter budget system works. The DCs for skill challenges grow by level and will always be appropriate for your character's ability. If you're reasonably competent, you can...

I generally don't like to assess the utility of a given tool by what happens when people misuse it. Seems like a pretty typical example of the old baby and bathwater cliche. It's a good demonstration of what I was talking about when I mentioned prejudging whether or not something is enjoyable...

There are no more products that have the words "D&D Essentials" on them. Essentials is a product line and it's complete. The argument is about how much future products will be like those products.

DMs screw up some times. It happens. My point was that your bad experience wasn't the result of the DM challenging you as a player, but the result of the DM reversing your success to safeguard "his story" (as if you can be the author of a story where other people control the main characters)...

No, the person kept on taking the challenge again and again, knowing the backlash was building each time they added to it. The reward (treasure and information) they were getting for each right answer tempted them too much for him to stop. They all knew that the backlash was built up when the...

I think one of the most important things to remember when challenging the players is to be fair. You figured it out. You got it. The DM taking that away from you after the fact is not a fair challenge for the players. Yes, I suppose one could argue that you should have written it down. But...

So I had a session today where I explicitly challenged the players rather than their characters. Usually in 4E, it's the DM's job to challenge the players through challenging the characters. I've been reading/running a more hardcore/challenging take on 4E (see saveversusdeath.com for info on...

I've been running a mixed HoX/PHBX games since Essentials came out. The differences in the power level of the characters has been negligible. Some people at the table picked HoX classes and other people picked PHBX martial classes. It's been 86 encounters and everything has worked together...

14. I remember really geeking out on different pole-arms as an early teen.

When i run 4E in normal mode, I keep the dungeons pretty small. The group in my current campaign is pushing paragon tier and going into dungeons has been happening less and less. But in my secondary FourthCore hard mode 4E game, the dungeon has one size: infinite. It's a campaign dungeon...

I needed to make some Companion characters out of monsters for today's session. It worked brilliantly. I used the compendium's search to filter by level and role, then brought it up in power2ool and edited it to make a lizardman into a human, a goblin into a halfling and a bugbear into a human...

This is exactly what I want from my game as well. I'm working on stripping the arbitrary leveling math out of 4e and making defenses based on comparisons with different armour types instead. I think you're on the right track for having the PC be not useless. The difficulty in gaining more HP...

Another thing to remember is that Wizards still makes the vast majority of their money from Magic: The Gathering. Sometimes I get the impression that people want Wizards to lose money and go out of business just so they can be right on the internet. You may have to settle for the minimizing of...