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I've done it, but it was with Fantasy Hero, not D&D. I think I could do it with 4E now, with the house rules I have in place. But then those house rules halve the combat times, and we were already fairly quick before those changes. So I think it can be done in a D&D geared towards "Dragon"...

Well, I'm in no way ripping the playstyle. They've got enough of that in the last 20 years. They don't need any more from me. However, I am speculating on why I think they don't seem to be very good at analyzing their playstyle, expressing it to others, or seeing the opposing playstyles. If I'm...

Concerning failure state, it's true that "looking good in the fiction" will be an incentive to some and totally irrelevant to others. That's why games that really care about this stuff, such as BW, provide other, different kinds of incentives. In BW, it's: What you wanted wasn't all that...

If your opponents is such a fool as to raise two thrusting/parrying weapons above his head, where they are no immediate threat and guard none of the body, does it matter what weapon you are using? And why would you care about a dagger in your right shoulder if you are hit at the same time with...

There is very little to nothing in the current playtest to take advantage of it, but another way in which this version of dual wielding could have increased usefulness is any situation in which you really need to get at least one hit in. Something like readying an action to disrupt an enemy...

Look in the skill section itself. How is "getting better with a skill" not "skill training"? My guess on the pregen bit is that this is directly compatible to what the class stuff says, which simply seems to be that wizard or cleric must pick a skill from that list they do not already have...

Nope. You are getting +1 to one current skill every other level, to a maximum of +7 in a single skill.

No one ever likes my solution to that. :p Have a kind of relatively cheap scroll that doesn't allowing casting the spell directly, but does allow it to recharge for someone who knows it. So an "encounter" spell in that scheme is one that isn't so easy that you can do it over and over with no...

In Basic, the d4 isn't that big of a deal. You've got only three steps from the d4 to d8, where the fighter maxes out. Plus, the Con bonuses are smaller and harder to come by. So as far as hit points are concerned, there is the default of d6, and then slightly weaker or stronger than that...

I'm not that wild about the range of the auto success on the rogue, but it is no worse than comparable things in the playtest, such as the dwarven poison immunity. It's not my style, but good enough as an early default in a simple playtest for "practically rarely fails at X"--if there are later...

Aside from any balance objections or straight flavor reasons, +1 to all stats is kind of a goofy mechanic in character creation. Being comprehensive, it's like a math adjustment, to make up for something humans aren't getting. That immediately makes one wonder what this something missing is...

They are trying to thread a pretty fine needle here. Given that they already provided a couple of ways to go about default gold in an adventure, for those that want it, it won't be hard to derive a table for "wealth the party would have gotten had you followed this guideline, adjusted for what...

Well, part of what we run into here is why they've kind of gotten away with squashing the categories over the years. There is certainly "technique" required to handle lots of power, and it is easy to start thinking about "technique" as "complexity"--if you don't look at it too hard. Think of...

This option help avoid the stacking issue. The stacking issue is when the adjustments become so good that they cross the line between "nifty advantage" to "punish those that don't conform". I like the former, the latter not so much. A dwarf fighter with +1 Con and +1 Str is definitely...

I'm not that concerned with what they call it, as long as it is semi-plausible for what it does. I'm more concerned that it does what it intends to do. The intention is still a bit vague, which is being reflected in the name change, but that's a symptom not a cause. Note that another...

I think the new way of wording the ability mod + skill bonus must have something to do with that +7 cap. It's not clear whether this applies as a +7 cap to how much you can increase the original +3 for having the skill, or the combined skill and ability mod. However, combining them and then...

Here's a radical but hardly original suggestion: Is it finally time to get rid of racial adjustments to stats altogether, and move them to class? Not only does that remove at a stroke a severe source of balancing issues, it makes the characters easier to construct. Pick fighter, you get...

I generally prefer even my Dragons play a wee bit faster and lighter than 4E typically delivers--though with house rules, I've almost got it where I want. So my ideal would be a 5E with options that lets me readily switch from Dragons to Dungeons and back again, even at the drop of a hat...

Spell level is a fairly decent measure of spell power. There are minor problems, sometimes because a spell is off by a level, other times because the spell is so situational that it is hard to peg cleanly for a given campaign (that is, it moves depending on the playstyle). Spell level is a...

I doubt it is possible for a DM to deep immerse on a routine basis, even if that same person otherwise does as a player. Though if the techniques work as reported, it might be possible in a game with only a handful of NPCs. I'm not even a deep immersionists at all, but once ran a murder...