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Terrible review. It's just notes made while flipping through the book, some of which are incorrect or are just inane. At no point does he bring his impressions together into anything resembling a rational thought. I know that writing standards have slipped in the age of internet content but this...

I was thinking total party XP, but I would be all in favor of bringing back level-drain. I think it's a great mechanic and doesn't seem too harsh in any game where players might have to start over at level 1 at some point. I'd like to run a pure dungeon-crawl campaign where character death =...

I want to see my friends do well and be happy in life and love but when it's gaming time I want to see the joy of victory and the agony of a natural 1. I actually think of myself as a softie in the sense that I don't like to be the one turning the screws, most of the time. I want the game to do...

There should always be a chance on any given adventure that you return with fewer XPs than you started out with, IMO.

Well yeah, the dramatic showdowns are rare. The players spend most of their decision points trying to shift the odds in their favor. This contrasts with a game where the players at their decision points make definite, incremental progress towards their goals. I'm suggesting that association...

I guess Rob Schwalb will be happy, skill challenges really did die in a fire.

What I'm getting at is that the difference between these two types of games is not really about the associated fiction of the game moves. That's a red herring I think. It's about how transparent the consequences are for the decisions players make. One can imagine Combat-as-Sport about ambushing...

I find that a bit patronizing, personally.

Good post! I think that's right. The tradeoff for tightening the feedback loop is that the drama of the game is spread out more evenly among all the decisions, rather than being all bunched up at the end of a series of decisions with a looser feedback loop. It's kind of like basketball vs...

You sound like the perfect customer, always ready to buy a new edition :)

Then Diablo happened and the tagline for 3e was "Back to the Dungeon"... I think you should consider the false consensus effect next time you're about to make a rhetorical point by claiming that most people share your preferences. I was, but in a game design sense, not a moral sense (should...

I took that into account. I'm considering a situation where both parties are trying to be sneaky, so 1 Dex roll for everyone, then take the worst Dex result from each side, and compare to everyone's passive Wis on the other side. So 8 rolls (assuming 4 vs 4) , find lowest on each side, and make...

The surprise rules seem so clunky that I can't see them being used often. Coming from 1e, I'm used to rolling for surprise for both sides almost every encounter. I like how it adds some variance to the initial encounter state, instead of it always being "you seem monsters about 30' ahead...

Surely in the basic sense that the game can be played without one of the players but not without the GM? I also would say that the quality of the GM influences the quality of the game more than any particular player. On a different note, could you say more about how the 4e rules help...

Yep, that was me. I was confused by his reaction to my post! I think he thought I was sarcastically trolling him :( I'm sorry that he became so upset by the reaction on his blog but I also think it was a bit silly for him to be surprised by it. On the other hand, I also think that 4e fans...

This was pretty rambling but I think I agree. D&D is a social game and should focus on the types of fun that transfer well across people by vicarious experience. This is especially important for the DM's fun. It's so much more fun to DM a game where the players wear their emotions on their...

HMMMMMmmmm very interesting. I like this quite a bit. It's not in the same league as Frazetta's S&S art, or Brom's Dark Sun stuff. It doesn't have the same dynamism. Needs more muscles. I don't quite understand how that pose and that weapon relates to the goblins being hit so hard they fly...

I really hope I have this information correct, but just so you and others know, I believe Warder was referring to the funeral in Israel for these teenagers.

I'm very sorry to hear that, Warder. :(

Reading these early 5e design threads I've also been reading early 4e design threads, since they're often linked at the bottom of the page as related discussions. I was just listening to this interview mearls gave in 2008 talking about "black box" design, where you write rules to produce an...