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While I'm sure you could make a case that it's further secondary advertising to an audience that might not play tabletop D&D, that's not actually the point. If it produced a third party adventure/monster book market and also a random video game, that's still a success.

I've got a theory it can be narrowed down to two points of design aesthetic that 4e didn't account for: Mundane prowess must be modeled through general systems for it to feel mundane. D&D magic must be at least partially universalized to be recognizable as D&D magic. That is, if you want your...

So he actually touches on this exact point in the interview, and notes that has always been the trend, that the RPG market contacts whenever D&D is on the downswing, and grows when D&D is rising. His argument here is that this is the first time that relationship seems to have broken, and he...

This all seems to be missing the point on how different modes of play work in those other games. I don't think we're comparing similar elements across different kinds of games here. All of the Magic variants are primarily driven by restrictions on how you build a deck. Drafting is selecting...

I think you may have mixed me and @pemerton up. I haven't had anything to say about this topic before.

Yeah, fundamentally I think PF is a pretty good argument that general existing player sentiment at the time wasn't calling for big changes or a relaunch, which led to 4e's level of change being perceived more like an imposition by WotC than a natural evolution. That being said, I was pretty...

This is before my time, so I'm really just guessing, but I wonder if that wasn't partially down to the lack of alternative, combined with the inverse effect of the OGL? The narrative felt a lot more like TSR was dying and WotC was stepping in to save the game, than WotC yanking support for a...

I don't think it would have helped as much as we might like. Presumably we'd have better early adventures, better tool support, probably wouldn't have awkwardly mixed attribute classes and we'd have snappier monsters out the gate. The Paizo split probably still happens, because that's driven by...

Oh, I don't think that follows at all, and I don't agree with your characterization of Bulmahn's argument. No one has actually done any real iterative update on the 3e framework. PF1 is the closest, and it was hampered by needing to very literally compatible with existing 3e material. A cleanup...

Yeah, this line still has traction today because Pathfinder ensured dissidents had somewhere to go. Really, I think this is more a knock-on effect of the OGL, and the attempt to claw things back via the GSL.

Is that particularly interesting? I feel like that's just recreating the healing problem, where it's nearly always correct not to heal, unless you'd lose more total actions thereby. It's never going to be correct to skip your turn, (if that d6 might put you down, another monster hit would also...

That's a reasonable thing to model, but it still seems better served by simply adjusting the DC. If it's rare to know the actual treatment for cockatrice petrification, then just set the DC to know it higher and assign a "missed by X" misinformation result. Is the concern that the player will...

That game is a good example of the broader knock-on effects of 4e's unique status. You get hit both for being not 4e enough or for drawing from it as a design well at all.

Really, what is character death but missing a whole bunch of turns?

Should the DM respond with "yes, you have 3/4s Cover" or with "yes, it's appropriate to hide now, if you can find 3/4s cover?" The first conditional is written as though the only thing you'll do is ask the DM directly about the action, the second is written as though you'll ask about the...

You're actually calling for double randomness here. Presumably it's already possible to fail the roll for information and have to proceed without it, which is already one injection of randomness, potentially followed by another if you succeed, but the information is invalid.

I like to go a step further, and treat knowledge generally (especially for monsters) as a passive skill that I as the DM roll against. Whatever DC I've set for the information (between 10-20 for monsters, generally), I subtract 10 from, and then roll against the PC's score.

Generally Rodney Smith and Co on Watch it Played are the best go-to rules explainers. My group has settled into a pretty comfortable routine; one player watches a video and reviews the rules ahead of time for the teach, if it's a heavy game, we all skim/read the rules separately before we meet...

I don't actually think that is the same. The bit that's frustrating isn't the lack of outcome, it's the lack of agency. It's one thing to make a decision or take a risk that doesn't pay out, it's quite another to not get to make a decision at all.

I think the process has been going on longer than you suggest here, but it might be accelerating. I'd point to the perceived lethality of swords and melee combat in general going down as a nod toward the D&D milieu's impact.