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Oh man, Kruthiks were one of my least favorite monsters from the Miniatures Handbook. I hope their 4th edition incarnation is a little more inspiring, but I have to say that the picture isn't doing it for me.

Okay, okay, well sometimes you're right. I looked through a few LG modules, and it looks like the combined total XP for story and roleplaying rewards is almost always exactly 20% of the total XP. The exact split is up to the author. I found a few with the full 20% allocated for roleplaying...

Huh? I play RPGA events pretty regularly, and players losing XP for roleplaying badly is something that happens. In many instances, roleplaying XP forms 10-20% of the adventure XP and the GM is well within his rights to dock it for stuff like that.- In the newer systems, where the DM fills...

I do not like the show/hide articles thing. I mean, we're talking about 5 lines of text and a small picture. If I don't care, I skip past them. If I do care, I have to click blindly on a little plus sign next to a title to find out more. I read a lot of blogs, and I'm pretty used to the...

Yeah, that's the thing. It's one thing to say that all epic level monsters should be fascinating, world-threatening creatures, but it's another thing to actually do it. After all, there's 10 levels in the epic tier, and each level is going to involve 10ish encounters with 5ish monsters in each...

I sure wasn't expecting the swordwings. Are they an entirely new monster? I'm not really impressed at first glance, but maybe they'll grow on me. What do you suppose the duration is on Mark of Death. It seems like it should last the whole encounter, but it's not listed. I hope the Encounter...

At first glance, I really like it. The single largest feature I like is the blog-style news and features posting. But really, there are a lot of superior things in your design, like the alignment, the headers, the navigation and the backgrounds. All around, very nicely done.

Now that the multiclassing except is out, I really suspect that Tira, the warlock, is only getting Ray of Frost through a multiclassing feat. That would mean that Tira gets one of the wizard's at-will powers as a 1/encounter power. Since it's an encounter power, she couldn't use it as a basic...

Woah, you're right. I thought I just did the math, but evidentially, I did it wrong. Yeah, I would say in that case that the Pit Fiend seems to be using some old formula.

That's true, but it's a weird coincidence that the formula works otherwise, but just gives him 6 HP/level instead of 8.

They haven't formally previewed anything yet. Some stat blocks, like those on the back of the DDM cards show what might be an older formula, but from DDXP forwards, all the monsters have HP from the following formula: [(level + 1) * class HP + Con score] * tier modifier Where the class HP...

I'm pleased to see the Rakshasa Assassin hit the art previews. Not quite as mysterious or magnetic a picture as the Githzerai, but still a nice picture. More importantly, Rakshasa as a race beat Githzerai anyday. Plus, it's good to see that the Rakshasa have taken a cue from some of the later...

As far as I know, there's nothing official, but in the D & D Miniatures line, being Insubstantial causes a creature to take half damage from attacks, and being weakened causes a creature to deal half damage.

In my game, which is 17th level now, one of the major sources of slowdown can sometimes just be adding all the dice up. I have two arcane types and one swordsage, and they can roll like 20 dice with their spells or powers. Then they have to add them all up, multiply them by 1.5, add in any...

Right, but there's a threshold there. In the examples with the ogres, you can't give them a +1 weapon and expect it to make +1 worth of difference. The ogres are already so powerful that it won't. If you give them a +2 weapon it will help them, but only as much as a +1 weapon helps a lesser...

It's think it's part of the 3.x to 4e difference in terms of encounter design. 'The cool' is now distributed among the 3-5 different types of monsters that are in a standard encounter instead of all concentrated in one monster. I think that's nice because A) You can better customize what kind...

I am liking these new crunchful previews. Although I think the ogre example is kind of weird, I think I see what it's saying, and I agree with it. I think it's just saying "if you want to add +3 to your monsters, don't use equipment, instead just increase their level." Anyways, customizing...

They don't in this case. The cards for Dungeons of Dread were prepared months before the rules were finalized. Compare the Grick on the cards to the Grick in the DDXP sample Monster Manual. There are clear differences between what's on the DDM cards from that set to what's in the printed...

Yeah, the HP chart is pretty interesting. It looks like one reason some of the high-level monsters don't seem to do a lot of damage is that PCs don't actually have as many HP as the monsters might. After all, the monsters we've seen have (6, 8 or 10 HP * (level +1)) + Con score for HP. PCs...

Ah right, well I wish I could remember where I saw it, but I think he mentioned it the context of many of the D&D Miniatures creatures, who have powers that recharge under specific conditions. I'm not sure how I feel about random recharges for PC abilities.