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I'm too lazy/sleepy to bust out my calculus for an exact percentage, so we'll go with another visual representation. Those corner squares are less than 50% covered, and a 10-foot line doesn't even quite touch the center of the corner squares. (Which are what, around 10.6 feet away?) I'm...

Okay, now with images, here was always my problem with distances measured by the 3.5 method. In the upper right, you see how reach should have worked, based on a logical interpretation of the 3.5 edition distance rule. Of course you can also see that by approaching the creature on the...

I'm not wild about firesquare, but I think that changing to a 1-1-1 model instead of a 1-2-1-2, will save about 30 seconds of recounting every session when somebody messes up. That's 30 more seconds of fun! One thing about the 1-2-1-2 rule that D&D 3.5 had is that it made things with a...

I think the designer's intent is to keep the specific options you have at any one point down. So you'll have lots of special powers, but if it works like Book of Nine Swords, you'll only have 6-10 of them available at any one time, for a player. For a monster it might be more like 2-5, from...

I enjoy DMing 3rd edition, but I'm looking forward to the 4th edition way of building NPCs and monsters. I'm probably repeating what people have said here, but I thought a few points needed reiterating or rephrasing. The 4th edition system lets you design a NPC from the top down, as opposed to...

Well, and as I see it, and as Mearls pretty much outright stated is that they're trying to keep the game moving by keeping options down. A situation I saw fairly often playing 3.5 is when even an experienced player gets into a situation that uncommon for him, and then has to carefully learn...

Well I think most of the dire animals were in the Monster Manual as animal companions for the druid. Still, I used a fair amount of them, particularly at lower levels. The one big hint that we have got is that either all or almost all of the monsters in the recent Desert of Desolation set of...

This isn't a necessarily new idea. I seem to remember a sidebar in the DMG talking explicitly about the idea that additions that make the game more random will generally inflict their negative effects upon the players more than any particular monster. At least I think I remember that. All I...

What I got out of it is that since the monsters aren't making as many attacks, their attacks will typically do more damage than any single attack did in 3rd edition. Also, although it's not mentioned specifically in the article, I think that PCs will have less total HP at higher (10+) levels...

I think I see what you mean. As a response, I would say that while classed monsters were consistent, or at least offered the illusion of consistency, they offered their own set of problems. I seem to remember people mentioning for years that classed NPCs were typically the weakest enemies at...

That's a good post and well thought out, but really I don't agree with most of it. Both WoW and D&D are adventure games, so of course there's similarities. D&D 4th edition seems to be paring back parts of its system that don't deal with adventure, but I can't agree that that's to compete with...

To point one more thing out, Wizards will be running a prerelease of the new D&D Miniatures set, "Dungeons of Dread" at DDXP. From the information we've been given so far, each monster in the set will have a full 4th edition statblock on the back of the card. So it will be like the information...

This sort of thing was built into 3rd edition too. While there were guidelines for how much natural armor a monster of a certain size had, or how much damage a slam attack did, there were no hard and fast rules, and the monsters as presented in the monster manuals varied widely. Plus, monsters...

While it's useful to wonder about the monster's part in the world, and how it got so far in life without the treasure it has, I think almost any system will break down eventually when examined in this fashion. After all, assuming you run a fairly standard campaign, why do the PCs face so few...

Personally, I doubt that players are tired of playing the classic fantasy races. In my (anecdotal) experience with Eberron campaigns, maybe one out of a group of four or five players would play any of the Eberron-specific races (shifter, warforged, kalashtar, changeling). The rest would play...

There's probably hydras at both sizes. After all this is only a 4-headed hydra, smaller than any that were in 3rd edition. That said, I would have to bet that the shift to having large hydras is at least partly motivated by the miniatures game. I may be misremembering, but didn't one of the...

The other interesting thing is that it seems that we'll have a pretty large supply of 4th edition stat blocks at the end of the month, since there's a Dungeons of Dread prerelease every day at DDXP, and all the cards seem to come with 4th edition RPG stats on the back. I wonder what secrets...

I agree that the drama of a game is usually, though not exclusively, created by the DM. The soul of a game is a different matter, and while the DM has some say here, I can see that there is a lot of "soul" in the system of certain games themselves. Also, while I'm optimistic about 4th edition...

I agree, but that's mostly because of the presentation. I mean it's presented as a command, but it's clearly some sort of power similar to a spell. It's even got the Fire keyword, though also somewhat strangely, it has the Charm keyword as well. Similar to your question, why can't they just...