While I agree with the bullet list on the first half of the article, the part that really caught my eye was the bit where Mearls not only passes the column off to Monte Cook, but also states that he has been brought onto R&D. While I am familiar with Arcana Unearthed, I had a much greater […]
I might have already said this, but I appreciate Mearls entrenching himself into the festering cesspool where the worst of the vocal minority lair, readying piles of vitriolic feces to hurl whenever he dares to open his mouth. Surprisingly this week’s thread is pretty tame, but which I mean to say that there is roughly […]
When it comes to skills I greatly prefer the approach of later editions: let the player tell you what they are generally trying to do, and then let a combination of dice and the character’s modifiers to determine the outcome. Mearls argues that this approach detracts from immersion because it causes players to focus on their […]
My response was “somewhere in the middle”, because it seems like a good part of what Mike Mearls is musing about already exists in the game–just written in a different way and/or in a different spot–and the other stuff seems fairly situational (likely making it harder to remember, especially if you get a lot of “talents”). I […]
Mearls contines to expound upon his concepts for a modular game system, and the more he talks about it the more I am in favor of it. I think. My understanding is that every class, or perhaps power source, starts at a baseline level of power. Groups that desire more complexity do so, effectively increasing […]
Classes with scaling customization sounds like a pretty interesting concept that has not been explored before. Basically a new player/player with little interest in making lots of decisions during the character creation process can opt to stick with a “core” character, similar to a build in Player’s Handbook (or an archetype from Shadowrun), while others can make […]
I think I get what Mearls is trying to say here: rather than have values derived from your ability scores, why not just use their values? In one example, he posits that instead of have a Fortitude defense derived from your Constitution score that you could just use Constitution. Interesting idea, though I wonder how it will handle stuff like […]
Courtesy of Mearls, there’s now additional options for Strength-based clerics to the tune of a variant class feature, variant Channel Divinity power, and sixteen at-will and encounter attacks ranging from levels 1-27. This is a hefty addition, and I’ll need to let my Saturday game’s dwarf cleric player do some retraining (especially because she even went […]
In this week’s Legend & Lore column, Mearls begins by submitting that in the early editions of Dungeons & Dragons it was easier for DM’s to modify the rules: one might just make shit up on the fly, while another might put a lot of time and effort into reaching a conclusion. He goes on […]
Not it! In all seriousness, my experience with clerics can be briefly summed up as, “I never played one before 4th Edition.” Ironically, it was the first character I actually played as part of a two-man delve, run by a person that had never ran D&D before, and it was a shitload of fun. Being able to […]
Points of Light 