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On one hand, this is fundamentally a philosophical disagreement about the validity of director-stance (as opposed to actor-stance) gameplay in D&D. On the other hand, wow, seeing somebody so desperate to die on the hill of bad faith play and weaselly justifications is like watching a toad hop...

Oh, man, that's an interesting angle. And I think it fits with certain oldschool possibilities regarding the DM assigning a Cleric's spells at will. One way I've been looking at it, though, it that a divine caster's powers—coming as they do from an immensely powerful external source—should be...

I'm with you, but I'd go further: domains all the way. No universal abilities. You should be able to build a Cleric that heals and turns undead with the right domain choices, sure—and those should be the defualt choices, for the non-customized version of the class—but you shouldn't be locked...

See, this strikes me as a really odd sentiment. You're seeing more redundancy between an unarmored divine caster and an unarmored arcane caster than you do between an armored divine caster-warrior and another armored divine caster-warrior? I'd hope that divine and arcane magic look different...

In all honesty, if they just dropped the Ranger completely, I wouldn't even notice until I heard the cries of outrage echoing across the nerdscape. ...But, that said, Minigiant's solution of letting the Ranger gather familiarity with foes and environments through play (rather than through...

So, various 5e communications have spurred lots of cool discussion on the nature of and distinctions between the Cleric and Paladin, as well as brining up the possibility of a non-fighty Priest class, the possible future of the Avenger, etc. One interesting thing that came out of this was a poll...

Rangers and Paladins were quite explicitly Fighter sub-classes when they first showed up, so I could easily see them being sub-classes/kits/builds/archetypes/whatever of the Figther in a new edition. I don't think it's gonna happen, but I think it would be possible do do it in a satisfying way...

I'm not a Tolkien guy by any stretch, but might he have had Warlord abilities? Like, a Ranger that had swapped out his spellcasting abilities for a Warlord kit?

I absolutely agree that the core game ought to be dead simple (and thus, in many ways, "classic"), but that's for the sake of the poor, bewildered new players. I figure we veterans can figure out which modular bits we need to add to play the game we want. It seems unreasonable to write the...

Some people believe that, the longer the post they make in defense of their position--and the more specific points they address in others' posts--the more knowledgeable and correct they seem. Personally, I think these people just come off as insane.

Aw, man, I was just about to post something along those lines. A lot of different kinds of frontier planet situation could be developed for the kind of long-term, freewheeling campaign common to fantasy RPGs. It's not hard to picture a world in the early years of colonization as being a D&D...

Now that I think about it, there are some places where 4e could use some new subsystems that wouldn't be in much danger of stepping on WotC's toes. Things like a crafting system, or rules for naval combat, etc. This is a great point, here. Encounters--clever little set pieces complete with...

Well, what I'd really like is for WotC to open up the Character Builder's API to us all, but assuming that ain't gonna happen, I think it only makes sense for third-party publishers to focus on producing adventures, adventure components (monsters, traps, skill challenges, terrain types / map...

I think what you're looking for is Fractal Terrains, more than Campaign Cartographer. It costs forty bucks, but there is a demo available. Check it out; it's pretty great.

Dark Sun done right? Seriously, though, when it comes to generating placenames--or any names, really--what I usually do is find a language (or even a few languages) with a flavor that I want to steal, and then toss a few hundred names or words from that language into this random word generator...

That's kind of a difficult statement to defend, I think. Class systems certainly sell better than classless systems, but I think that has more to do with the potential player's ease in understanding available character archetypes. "Oooh, I can play a necromancer!" comes a lot quicker than...

I do not dig XP costs for anything. They feel ridiculously punitive, they frequently tax those who won't actually be benefitting (directly) from the expenditure, they threaten to disrupt level parity, and they make things rather difficult for those of us who don't use XP in the first place...

In addition to Aus Snow's excellent suggestion, I can recommend John H. Kim's awesome RPG Encyclopedia. It is absurdly huge, includes forgeign language stuff, and even describes a little about the setting and system of most games. But, yeah, as everyone's been pointing out, there are enough...

I think archetype enforcement is generally pretty lame, so I've got no problem with wizards in plate mail. Also, the "armor inferferes with magical gestures" explanation always sounded pretty lame to me. Surely that should only apply to gauntlets, then, right? And would extend to divine...

A big thanks to Solodan and everybody else in his Living Forgotten Realms game. That was a hell of a lot of fun. 4e totally performed as advertised: Even at first level, the game was full of interesting abilities and tactical choices. We were basically all new to the system, but it ran pretty...