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Well, I'm not going to get the main thing I want, which would need to be the foundation of the whole design, namely the realization that in game design, sometimes "less is more". Yes, you can have too many races, classes, spells, feats, powers, items, etc. So I'd like a game that wasn't...

Dealbreaker Spend 1 Stamina. You try to convince the rest of the party to let you have the magic mace +2/+3 against owlbears but sell the wand, staff, and elven boots, or if you don't you'll take your sword and go home. If they make a Wis save against your Cha -5, they realize that this is a...

I also wouldn't mind some proper names with spell names that were more truthful: Malboro's Mildly Pokey Missile William Rae's Ray of Slight Lassitude Buster Jane's Detect Something Useful If You Guess Right Of course, the way they have been does fit Vance in "The Dying Earth" and "Rhialto...

You'll need more poll choices than that before you'll get my participation. "No" has got a lot of "No, but" and "Not exactly" and other potentials that really aren't the same thing at all.

And I'll say again that the real problem of 15 MAD is not that it happens very often, but the unnecessary work that DMs and players go through to see that it doesn't. I haven't had a 15 MAD problem personally since my first year of DMing at age 14--and even then it was kind of hard to complain...

Having been a fan of Vance's "Dying Earth" almost as long as I've been running D&D, I've always liked the names. I do agree that there should be some kind of information about where they come from, if only in an appendix. It wouldn't hurt to include a few suggestions about changing the names...

The problem with tools and techniques that discourage 15 MAD is that all of them are limited and imperfect, and most of them are somewhat specialized and inapplicable in certain situations or playstyles. My reaction to this state of affairs is that rather than give up, settle on a handful of...

I did run 1E quite a lot (and BECMI too, at low levels). It's not the answer to all that Mustrum is trying to cover here. Mainly, the problem with "just go back to the way 1E did it," is that the problem 3E was trying to solve when it busted casters wide open was still a real problem. It's...

Yes. I'm riffing off your response rather than responding to anything in particular. The explanation is most definitely a good things in many contexts, especially when you are actually playing the game (with possible exception here for certain DM tasks). It's more ambiguous during development...

As an aside, in my running of Gardmore Abbey, I've finally fully drifted skill challenges (which are ad hoc for me) into nearly always: All players state what they are doing. All players roll. All players narrate something appropriate to the roll. DM narrates/reveals results. Go to next...

No. It shows how shallow "market research" is when it treats the name of something as universally "the thing." Of course, the problem of failure to understand the different concepts of identity, is hardly new with Next surveys.

I agree with the general thrust of your whole post, but think there parts of the above that go too far in the other direction. Namely, the key means of creating an illusion of a "living world" and thus reducing 15 MAD is not to always have 4 encounters (or any number) but to vary them...

Good to know where you stand on this.

I don't mind "lesser" and "greater" spells as a systematic treatment of some variety in spells--as many people have suggested various ways, or as Arcana Evolved used for "diminished" and "heightened" spells. But if all they are going to be is a way to pretend the same spell is two different...

I got sucked into details, due to the nature of the survey itself, and didn't think to give the comment that, upon reflection, fits my attitude about the exercise: They could do a lot worse than to take the Rules Cyclopedia spell list as a starting point, cull the 20% of spells that are least...

This has already been refuted multiple times in this topic. Nothing to see here! Move along!

The DM (AKA, the gods, fate, destiny, etc.) is going to make sure that I get a bunch of exceptionally nifty equipment to keep up with the wizard and cleric IS a mythic power. It's kind of an odd one, that people can avoid looking at directly while pretending it just happened, but if you look at...

Heck no. Adapt the Burning Wheel "Circles" and "Resources" sub systems to Next as a module. It wouldn't even be that difficult, though a straight port won't quite get the job done with BW using die pools as the base mechanic. Best of all, they won't muck up the framework of Next for people...

On the wizard memory thing, I've also had a small instance of memory loss, though not as dramatic as pemerton's. Mine was a car wreck that initially knocked out about 30 hours of memory, but gradually shrunk down to about 6 hours that never came back. It's just a hole where everyone around me...

No one has even mentioned the real problem with Fighters as Batman? If we do that, and have Batman and Paladins in the same game, think of how turbo-charged the alignment arguments will get. :hmm: I do think there is a nuance to the Fighter as Batman that depends upon what you mean when you...