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I am thoroughly convinced if 4e ran in reverse order (starting with essentials and ending up with the PHB) the game would have been better received. Essentials feels like the bridge between the older style of play and 4e's very modernistic style. As it was, the transition from 3e to 4e...

You brought up an interesting point: thanks to the d20 glut, how many properties are left to tap in the RPG square? I guess you could Fortnite it and have a Jedi, a Hogwarts wizard, a white mage and an a member of the Order of Assassins form a party to go fight Freddy Krueger, but it's not like...

Final thought: that also assumes a traditional setting in the vein of Ravnica. A UB product COULD just be something like an Elden Ring bestiary or a Species of Final Fantasy without a larger setting context: a real "use this how you want in your game" style material that could havea module where...

So let's realistically look at what a Universes Beyond could be. MTG:UB comes in different sizes from a secret lair (a handful or cards, some re-themeed and some new) to a full set. I don't know what the D&D equivalent is but let's say it's the difference between a web supplement and a full...

My point was that if you are going to have a bunch of classes able to use encounter abilities, perhaps it would be helpful to have general pools of abilities shared over many classes (ala weapon masteries and shared spells) then have each class be an island of all unique abilities. Regardless...

I don't know if this helps or not, but one of 4e's issue was the sheer amount of redundancy in creating 3-5 powers per level every time they reached a new power level. Would a shared powers system (where PCs can pick from a shared common pool and then have a few class specific powers) help the...

That's a bit of my point. The game is perfectly balanced to avoid nova, and the first thing players want is new toys that throw that balance out of whack. Repeat over several editions and you get the problems you cited: characters with nova buttons and bags of HP. To blame this on modern D&D as...

And that alone is a lesson that comes with experience. A new DM who thinks a 1st level party can handle two ogres isn't going to have the awareness to know how to fail forward. D&D fights are lethal damage unless the DM knows to pull his punches. There are a lot of situations where a DM can...

Have you seen the BECMI'S system? It makes 5e's system look like elementary school math.. 4e MATH was bad. It was fixed come MM2. That's not a failing of Challenge rating though. Still rather have 72 pages of errata than TSR saying "I don't know, what do you think we are, game designers?!" It...

Figure it out yourself is useful for when you have someone who knows the rules and is interested in learning a style, but it's absolutely terrible for teaching the basics. Put another way, I would never buy a car whose operatiing manual says "figure it out yourself".

My memory of it from 3e was the sourcebooks were great but the modules were boring. I even won a free one on this site decades ago and found it so dense and uninspiring that I never bothered to run it or even harvest it for parts.

"Original D&D is the only true game. All the other editions are just poor imitations of the real thing." - diaglo

Again: the perfect form of D&D already exists and it's in the Rules Cyclopedia. D&D never needed to change. If only all these D&D players who learned to play wrong could be retrained... Tongue thoroughly in cheek

Nonsense. The bathwater must be disposed of, infant and all.

It's rich to say players don't know what they want and have been manipulated to play in a certain style rather than to say the style players want today isn't the still you want. Real "no, it's the children who are wrong!" Energy...

You know, we can save a LOT of time if we just reduce the DMG to "figure it out yourself". Encounter balance? Figure it out yourself. Treasure distribution? Figure it out yourself. World building? Figure it out yourself. Monster creation? Figure it out yourself. Campaign management? Figure it...

Fine. Let's remove the encounter building guides (and the treasure guides too while we're at it) and let DMs learn it the old fashioned way. They should have a good idea after their sixth ruined campaign...

If you're optimized, yes. Which is part of the issue. CR is training wheels. Removing it is giving a kid a new bicycle and telling them to learn how to ride it themselves while running the Tour de France.

I dunno. I remember a starter module in 2e that did that and I cheated like a b@stard to avoid the tpk. So I guess my learning curve was it doesn't matter as long as I was willing to pull my punches. I'm sure that's the lesson we want to teach new DMs.

This has always been an issue of psionics being shunted off to the "optional" side of D&D. D&D wants to have Psionic effects (telepathy, telekinesis, mind reading) but people either complain about it being too "sci-fi" or not fitting D&D's fantasy concept (artificer has the same problem) so the...