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My only hope is that whatever we get for mult-iclassing, it is explored before the single-class stuff gets too locked down. "Get part of your new class stuff," is ok for a kludged on multi-class option. It's not so hot for a game that is intended from the very beginning to support...

Just to blissfully stick my nose in the middle and probably get it blooded, I think you are both somewhat right, but coming at the question from different angles. I agree with you that in any kind of "inherent" sense that the original "disassociated" stuff is claiming exists in mechanics, that...

I hesitate to say, "never." But a lot of things are pretty darn close. If the Next psionic system isn't very good, I'll never use it. It it is really good, I might use it once or twice in five years of play, but wouldn't miss it if I didn't have it. Tieflings leave my whole group blah. I...

D&D variants can do almost anything. If someone wants to take a D&D version and use any number of hit point replacements, that's a D&D variant. I suppose if varied enough, it becomes a lot less like "the heart of D&D" than it was. But if someone tries to produce something that is purportedly...

Speaking only for myself, that exact problem was a big contributor to my first spat of burnout as an almost all the time DM. This was a problem for me across systems. The way we gradually resolved it was that I put the onus back on the players, but one at a time. This is, for example, the...

ZombieRoboNinja, that's a great argument for why rogue should not be considered "martial" and then why only martial classes should be considered for combat superiority. It's not so hot for why CS should be fighter exclusive. I think to make the fighter exclusive argument, you then need to...

Eliding the gratuitious shot, I think you are here seriously underestimating the importance of HP. XP I can sort of, kind of see a case made for as a lesser thing, though I think trying to remove it entirely would carve off whole slabs of the fan base. But HP is like class and level. It's in...

I agree. 4E in particular would be a better game with longer rounds, as it fits what 4E is attempting to do. I don't know that I'd go back to full minute rounds, as that has other baggage, but something between 10-30 seconds would work. I'd go 15 seconds myself--though both 12 and 20 have...

The WotC needs to make good rules, fill page count, and spark interest in the products are not always in sync--with each other or with particular fan expectations or wants. Then there is communication of design intent versus communication of actual rules versus adapation by particular fans to...

Yes. That's part of the reason why paragon paths and epic destinies are a somewhat better (but not perfect) replacement for prestige classes in their original purpose--the 4E options do change the character, but aren't so embedded in the math, and add on in almost a separate dimension. For that...

There real problem here is one that I pointed out over a year ago: All the good, established names for something vaguely wizard-like have been hijacked in recent culture to mean something very much in keeping with the D&D wizard idea--potent spellcaster in robes. This is despite the fact that...

How about instead of different resources for each mode, you have some particular resources that work differently in each mode? This might even work better if the time scale also deliberately changes, so that "bullet time" really is playing out a given time frame in more detail. This is easy...

I think the "you have to earn the right to play the character you want to play" thing is mostly odd in 2E--and then only because the setting and module assumptions made it odd, not because of rules changes (of course). I don't see this as odd in even early 3E, because 3E very consciously goes...

I ran five 2nd level PCs from playtest 2 through more of the Caves of Chaos. Eight orcs attacking from ambush got them all down into single digits before their luck turned. They ended up not losing a person. But this was a classic case of mostly bad rolls by the players and good rolls by the...

I quibble over "blames" as what is done to the person here, but that is just a quibble ... I'm not sure that you can apply one word to this phenomenon, because I'm not sure that it is one thing that causes it, when it is caused, or that it is consistent. Plus, no doubt there are elements of...

The thing for me is that, considered in isolation, the director choosing a scene where, "There is an explosion. Character does something. Character dies," when this is supposed to be a protagonist that wants to live--that choice is pretty jarring for me in most normal contexts--regardless of...

OK. However, if you do a story of nothing but the first one in parallel--where the character dies, that also starts to get pretty strange considered in isolation. Why didn't you break that one out? The question as written makes no sense. Edit: And reading your reponse to D'Karr below and...

In the first playtest, hit points started high. In the second one, they seemed to have gone for the opposite extreme (with the survivor specialty as a big exception). So to split the difference, what about adding an extra hit die by race? Humans can be second to dwarves, in that they are fairly...

If you did a story of nothing but the third one, that would be pretty strange. Maybe if you did the "big action hero" version of "Waiting on Godot" it would fit. However, if you do a story of nothing but the first one in parallel--where the character is also always dying, that also starts to get...

Sure. There has be a certain amount of shared stuff, or we couldn't even talk about as "D&D". The trick with D&D is that it's a giant Venn diagram where practially nothing is in the center bit that all the circles touch, even though there is much, more more that a lot of circles touch. OD&D...