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I think part of the ranger's popularity is due to the fact that it's got two popular archetypes cornered. The ranger is the best class with two weapons and the best class with a bow. Other archetypes, like the heavily-armored melee type, have multiple classes, such as the fighter, paladin and...

I think this is the thing. If you obsess over every little +1, then of course it's going to be hard to "give up" that +1 by choosing a race that doesn't boost that stat. But, as UngeheuerLich points out, that +1 is not going to affect you that much. In any one combat, where you might make one...

Well, the last 3e campaign I DMed went from 1st to 20th level, so I speak of the wizards' dominance firsthand. We did play with the Book of Nine Swords, so it wasn't like the fighting classes were just "power attack, power attack" while the wizards did "force orb, dimension door, feeblemind"...

Ready for the second rant about knock scrolls? Like what even is a knock scroll but a chime of opening that's cheaper because only the wizard can use it? What are scrolls for in general? They're for the spells that you don't really want to memorize because they're only very situationally...

Well, I'm sure we can argue this back and forth all day. But, like I said, I had Craft Wonderous Item, and the opportunity to use it, so I had pearls of power to regenerate my offensive capability between combats. And it wasn't really half my spells devoted to survival. I only listed about 4...

The whole "shifting into the shadowfell" thing, I think, has an uncanny resemblance to Bilbo Baggins using the One Ring in The Hobbit. Maybe it doesn't to you, and I admit it's far from an exact match, but that's what I thought about when I first read it. And again, maybe it's a difference in...

Nah. My personal experience, and I've seen the sentiment echoed on these boards is that you can build your fighter to be get a nearly striker-level damage output if you want to. Fighters don't get the bonus damage that strikers do, but their weapon-related features (Weapon Training, Combat...

At the same time, it's easy to see that a "broken" rule can make every encounter end with the same application of the "broken" rules, while a balanced game will encourage a certain diversity in outcomes. All the positive anecdotes about 3e wizards seem to assume that there is only one main...

I tend to agree with MrMyth that the extra bonuses will be made up for by miscellaneous bonuses. For example, if the PCs have a Warlord who took Knight Commander as a Paragon Path, that's +2 to attack. If the attack is a Kensai, and has his Back to The Wall, he's almost even. If he could gain...

Absolutely, and my favorite sessions are where everybody is happy with "good enough" and the game flows smoothly. The problem is, that while it's easy for everybody to agree on this while things are going well for the party, my experience is that once things start going badly for the PCs...

The main thing I'm learning while DMing is that 4e monsters have a lot of HP and that you want to design encounters so that most of the monsters will die while the encounter is still interesting. One thing I noticed while converting encounters from 3e to 4e is that you don't really want to...

I don't think 3.5 gets too painfully complicated at levels 1-8. But still, my own back-to-3.5 experiences was that it took very little time for the sheer mass of rules to get on my nerves. Little things, like how if you charge or run, it has to be in a straight line and you can't even clip the...

One thing to be aware of when your fighters move to lock enemies down is the difference between a normal opportunity attack and the fighter's combat challenge attacks. There's probably already a thread posted on this in the 4e rules forum, but to summarize, the combat challenge attacks and...

Actually, recently I've been leafing through the 4e Monster Manual a bit before bed. I wouldn't call it reading, but I've found myself looking at the encounters at the end of each monster block and imagining how I could work those encounters into my campaign. You know, thinking up reasons why...

I have to agree with SRM here. When my players are actually invested in their characters and their development is when I feel they most acutely feel the risk of dying. And when they are, that's penalty enough. Saying that there's no consequences for death or failure just because they don't...

I must have missed the official announcement then. I've read the 3e and 2e Monster/Monstrous Manuals fairly recently, and there is next to nothing in either of them about cooperation or negotiation with adventurers. Most of it is filled with monsters that essentially exist to fight. To avoid...

Worlds and Monster, IIRC, has a section where they talk about how they abandoned that concept. When they had multiple initiative rolls, monsters' turns tended to "clump" either through simple coincidence, or whenever either the players or the monster used any kind of initiative-changing action...

That, and getting the bonus from agile armor requires a significant investment in stat points, if you're using point buy. The initial 14 costs 5 out of your 22 points. I know that a 15 Dex at paragon is also useful for some good feats, but the cost is there.

Sure, but I guess my point was that of a counterexample. I run campaigns in what I consider to be living and lifelike worlds full of a broad selection of creatures, and the 4e MM provides me with what I need for that.

The Adventurer's Vault has prices for all the Monster Manual I mounts. The hippogriff is priced at 4,200 gp, the same as a level 9 item. They don't explain the pricing system but it seems to price mounts at the level of a magic item at the mount's level, or level +2 or level +4. All the...