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Woops - I meant to emphasize Li Shenron's suggestion that they are (or can be) characters in the sense that not all are alike and you can roleplay with them. Didn't catch that "class level" comment when I quoted (not that I oppose his preference for this). I liked the way 4e approached...

Thanks for sharing this. I have a 3 year old son who already gets excited when my friends come over to play D&D. He has no real clue what is going on, but everyone pretty much tolerates him putting "his" miniature on the table (which can be anything from an elf to an otyugh to R2D2) next to...

No one in my group ever cared to play a 4e sorcerer, so my concept of the wizard/sorcerer distinction is mostly the 3x version. The way it seemed to me was that wizards and sorcerers shared a spell list because in the end, they were bringing about the exact same phenomena. Wizards did it by...

This is an EXCELLENT point that I think got buried amid the Great Ogre Debate... It also got me thinking about the use of monsters as NPCs and the use of "people" (humans and other PC races) as mooks. It seems like you can make monsters more mysterious at lower levels by having them be rare...

Can't XP you, but this is an awesome explanation. Some of the best parts are when Indy is just as shocked as the bad guy that it worked.

I like these ideas. My first thought on the first one was "Cool concept, but we'll have to have some sort of fumble table and introduce a clunky component." But the more I thought about it, the consequence of failure could be something as basic as provoking a reaction from the target (or...

If magical healing is relegated to a ritual, then it expends no spell slots and has a component cost. The cleric is limited only by the amount of magical reagents they carry. It also puts more value on potions as the best option in combat so the cleric doesn't have to take himself out of the...

Tiefling Traits As a tielfing, you have all the following traits. Size: Medium. Tieflings average 5’6” – 6’2” in height and typically weigh between 140 and 230 lbs. Speed: 30 feet. Low-Light Vision: If there is no light within 30 feet of you, you treat shadows in that radius as normal light...

I thought this was a particular strength of the way 4e approached XP. The scale was not what you're describing, but it was the same paradigm and it made encounter design easier. Incidentally, they pretty much ported in the encounter design/XP budget concept from 4e into the play test. I...

Exactly. Historically, wizards/magic-users, clerics, druids, illusionists, bards, paladins, rangers, and assassins have all shared the same basic spellcasting mechanic. What differentiated them was the spell list, rate of advancement, skills, equipment, saves, attack bonuses, and other class...

One goal I had for dragon breath is that it be equivalent to a damage dealing cantrip a high elf could get as a racial trait. That said, the range is all wrong (I just used the range and damage for ray of frost). I like making it akin to burning hands in terms of range. A cone fits a breath...

4e Tieflings had a power called "Hellish Rebuke" which was basically a reaction to attack an enemy that had just wounded them. I did the dragonborn first and felt I'd already used the concept for draconic fury. Then I recalled that Tieflings originally had a more creepy, unsettling motif and...

:uhoh: Yeah, that was really meant more for bluff checks.

I think that's a good call on the range. The Tiefling at Points of Light is similar to my original idea. I was going to give charm person to diabolical ones and cause fear to demonic ones, but I really didn't want to get into granting spells.

It wasn't intended for the breath attack. Perhaps I should make it a melee attack only? Kinda nerfs it for wizards. But I'm also not sure I want to let a dragonborn wizard cast his higher level attack spells this way either.

My group us thinking of picking up the Neverwinter campaign I had started but using D&D Next instead of 4e. The first big challenge is that the party includes a Tiefling Warlock and Dragonborn Warlord. The player of warlord is fine remaking the character as a DDN fighter. The problem is the...

I was thinking about this discussion quite a bit last night and it occurred to me one of the cool things emerging with the modular design of Next is that any of us could decide to use the ideas we've presented here in our games and it won't break the other components (spells, combat, racial...

I like that they've made detect magic an at-will cantrip. Otherwise, I agree. In the current paradigm, I wonder if dispel magic should be able to be used without being prepared/memorized both as a ritual for situations where you encounter a standing magical effect (such as a ward or other zone...

I think a skill needs to be limited to something that takes appreciable time and practice to develop over and above raw ability. So I agree with the previously stated idea that if you couldn't imagine a character with a high ability score not being able to do something, it's probably better...

2e had no default setting. 2e had more settings written for it than any edition. Coincidence? Maybe. But it seems to me the more narrative you attach to the core system, the more you constrain setting developers by forcing them to either incorporate the core fluff or spend extra page space...