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I think the blog post is a pretty interesting and thoughtful exploration of the problems inherent in the action economy, even if I don't agree with all of Rodney's conclusions. I've definitely had a problem with players having so many cohorts, animal companions, etc that the game bogged down...

Right, but we're talking about a level 10 spell. By level 10, the Wizard is going to have an AC closer to 20-22 or higher. Maybe 10 AC base, +5 from levels, +4-5 from Int, +2-3 from enchanted cloth armor. Plus other stuff that we don't even know about. Does each mirror image have all that...

The spells, for the most part, look fine to me. I like the fact that with mirror image, there's no wrangling about whether if an attack missed, it missed narrowly enough to hit an image, or which exact image did it hit or anything. The spell is simplified, and that's they way I like it...

I didn't listen the podcast, but it seems like the point was that the player's fate should be decided more by the actual decisions they make than the result of their skill challenges The skill challenge shouldn't decide whether the player accomplish something, period, but instead whether they...

Well, the other mechanical difference is that the checks are allowed against 3 different DCs, easy, medium and hard. A failure on an easy check produces some sort of penalty beyond just the general "failure" result, and a success on a hard check produces some sort of additional success. I...

While it's true that if you always roll the same skill against the DC, there's not much difference, in terms of probability between just rolling once, or rolling until you get 5 successes or 5 failures. What makes it somewhat different is the group participation. The way I've seen it, you're...

Oooh, ouch, it is. And the books have gone to print already. We need someone to yell "stop the presses!"

So you're saying that you would prefer 4e to a be system that goes from 1-10, but most people are still a 3? I don't personally agree with that, but that's mostly because if 4e was the kind of game that required an expert DM carefully matching the adventure to the players that would rule out...

I would agree with ZombieRoboNinja. To look it at another way, the fighter needs to be in melee to take damage. The wizard can do damage at range. That means that the fighter is going to be taking damage from enemy melee types, like enemy fighters, but also from enemy artillery types, like...

Well right, that's the exact same problem, just reversed. I think that if a goal is that everybody who wants to play the game should be able to participate in a meaningful way, that being able to build a character who skews heavily towards combat or noncombat is not reaching that goal. Combats...

I think the DMG will probably contain some advice similar to that in the 3.5 book Dungeonscape, where it states what types of terrain each of monster typically prefers, as well as which type of allies best support it. Basically the advice Dungeonscape gives is to pick a role that you want to be...

Yeah, comparing the monsters on the DDM cards to the ones in the Monster Manual preview pages, the ones on the DDM cards all had less HP than you would expect. If we plug the same formula that seems to be in use on the Feygrove Choker, the Eidolon would have something like 102 HP instead of 59...

The HP formula we've seen on the monsters so far (at least the ones from the Monster Manual pages on view at DDXP) is: ((Level + 1) x Role HP per level + Con Score) x Power Multiplier Where "Role HP per level" is a the number of HP each role gets each level, so: Brute = 10 Skirmisher/Soldier...

That I can agree with. I hope there some kinds of rules for modeling monsters as allies in a fight, including healing surges, etc. I suspect there are, even if they're something totally different than the PC rules, like all monster get 1 healing surge per encounter or something. I agree that...

I think it's just as simple as their passive perception score. If it's too low, they get suckered in. If they get suspicious make an active perception check then they can use that. So yeah, my opinion is passive perception=initial save. It's even better since you don't have to ask them to...

I disagree here. I think that good game design takes the option that the most people want and makes it the way to play the game. Too many optional rules are bad for the game. I know a lot of people like to say "why isn't my preferred playstyle even an option?" but taken to the extreme, this...

Well, as the War Troll thing taught me, balance uber alles is kind of a worthwhile goal. A lot of the 3e powers were balanced, but others were not, so they led to situations where the creative min/maxer was playing a War Troll, while the guy who just wanted to play the game "normally" was...

I am almost exactly on the opposite side of this. So many monsters already had abilities that would wreck a campaign in 3rd edition if the players got them that eventually they had to totally errata bascially every book to remove polymorph-type abilities. Pre-errata as soon as you got a Master...

Well right, but are the racial stat modifiers the only thing that make a monster act in character? You said earlier that: The thing is, is it their stats that made them different? The Gnoll and the Orc both have +4 Str, medium size, and generally end up pretty similar. It's more of the...

The book Dungeonscape had some really good advice for planning encounters. In fact, it probably was a proto-4e book, since not only did it encourage you to break down monsters by roles and use multiple roles in an encounter, but also looking at the 4e preview adventures, some of the encounters...