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I said last spring, and still believe it -- there will be two or three decent games to be made out of the leftovers from this effort (with some judicious sharing of elements between Next and those other possible games). That is, I think there will be some pretty nifty parts that simply don't...

I liked about 75% of where they seem to be going. If they can maintain anywhere close to that with a modular system, I'll be estatic with the finished product. But of course as it gets closer to done, there will be more bloat, too. In any case, we played again this last weekend with the...

mild spoilers We had an odd game today. There were all kinds of interruptions that had nothing to do with the game itself, but the funny thing was the way the players got spooked having made 5th level. We've been exploring the original Caves of Chaos, adapting to the play test updates as...

Instead of a flat limit, vary the time and sacrifices required as more items are attuned. Then you must make a Cha check after the interval, rather than it being a flat limit on numbers. Also move up the chart for more rare items, down for sacrifices. Perhaps: 1 minute 5 minutes 10 minutes 20...

Cyclic initiative, where every participant completes a set of discrete actions before the next participant acts, is not the only way to handle a turn-based game. It is a way that happens to work fairly well with 6-second (or shorter) rounds and the rest of the 3E/4E assumptions, but far from...

Perhaps. The intention of my post was that "segments" would get used for combat more often, and thus have their own dedicated mechanics. In particular, some powerful spells would generally require a segment to cast (and thus would rarely be tried in the shorter rounds). But don't stop there...

Yes, 10 to 20 seconds is where I'd put it, though I also agree for the need for some scaling. Actually, the problems with 5-6 seconds and also with 1 minute are that they are too far to the extremes of the practical ranges, making the scaling more difficult. If the default is somewhere around...

I don't think we'll ever get a truly excellent skill system in D&D. There are too many aspects of the core idea of the game that work against it, the d20 resolution being just the tip of the iceberg. I would like it if the designer of the skill system, however it goes, is not under the...

4E is not the wrought-iron fence made of tigers. That concept more properly applies to something like Faerie's Tale or Hero Quest or any system with completely mallable elements. 4E is more like a traditional game with part of it surrounded by a soft bronze fence made of kittens. :p The...

Timely topic. I've been thinking on this for the last week, and I think I have a new way to frame the problem, even if I don't have an answer to it: We've been misconstruing the essential characteristics that define the rogue. Instead of skill money or trickster or stabber or thief, rogues are...

Back last spring I introduced a topic calling for more mundane equipment. Have a bigger variety of mundane equipment that matters well into the middle power levels--and maybe even a few bits that matter into epic. Then you can have "barely magical" stuff that is still pretty nice. A basic...

Yes. It's not as if the existence of separated magic systems means that each class that gets access to a system gets it to the same degree. I don't mean something rather mindless, such as "bard gets a magic system at 2/3rds power of whatever a wizard would have gotten". Historically, that's...

That's like saying that the biggest concern going to the beach is that someone might get sand in their clothes or get wet. Just saying ... ;)

The problem you'll run into with that kind of system is that for the kinds of things where it applies, it will work very well. But it doesn't apply to everything. This is, in part, because a lot of skills are a synthesis of a whole host of other skills and/or (natural) talents. Take for...

Note in passing: There is no reason that putting the choice of magic mechanic systems in the DM's hands (however the DM consults with players) is in any way a requirement that the magic mechanic systems be in the DMG. It is only required that they be outside the class listings. Such...

I take the reductive view that if, for example, swapping out the "wizard default casting mechanics" for the sorcerer makes the sorcerer just another way to play a wizard--then there wasn't any point in having them as separate classes in the first place. That is, it has often been the case that...

Assume that this idea can be made to work cleanly. Now double the number of class levels in each class chart, making the "half" levels the odd ones and the "full" levels the even ones. Start all single-class characters at level 2. How is this different, functionally, than the original idea...

As a long time player of Fantasy Hero (3d6 for most checks) and a FH/D&D-ish homebrew (2d10), I can attest that the biggest changes when switching dice resolution in this manner are the changes to the "whiff factor" and effects on criticals (and auto misses). The criticals wouldn't be felt...

If we are going to get something similar to the current model (i.e. not something out of left field that turns out to be more nifty than I can imagine), then I'd like to see skills broken into two distinct pieces: Category A gives narrow but significant bonuses in something. DefCon1's...

Yep, looks as if they are going to over react again. They are going to get so hot about the "everything in 4E is the same" crowd that they make everything in Next different to be different, rather than--I don't know--making things the same that are working well the same and making things...