The direction of D&D Next is to expand ‘story’ not ‘mechanics’: After the core rules for the game are done, we really want to stop adding so much stuff to the mechanics of the game and shift our emphasis to story. I knew when I read this that I was going to have a hell of a time writing this response. The false dichotomy there glares at me: why can’t mechanics and rules be one-in-the-same, or at least complementary? That’s not the real core of Mike’s post though. The core here is D&D as a common language: D&D is a shared language. The rules serve to make it easier to talk...

Most of Mike’s Legends and Lore post is about roles in D&D Next: how do you handle specialized characters and general situations? The underlying issue is this: suppose you’ve got a band of adventurers where one character (let’s call her the fighter) is better in combat than everyone else. How do you still make combat interesting for everyone? D&D Next appears to be taking the approach of making the difference between “highly skilled” and “just passable” fairly low: Every class should have the potential to contribute to a fight, and our efforts to make attack bonuses fairly flat mean...

This is another one of those big crazy ideas that I throw out their based on the best data I can have and some speculation. I don’t think I’m the first person to come up with this idea, and therefor the fact that it hasn’t been done probably means there are factors that smarter people have identified that I haven’t. I’m throwing it out here because I like at least considering the big crazy risks that don’t scare me because it’s not my money, but which the actual people who could do this would be gambling their livelihoods with. Here’s the big idea: open source D&D. The obvious response is...

The big topic of Mike’s post is the role of non-combat healing and the essential-ness of having a healer. It’s essentially a reverse from the earlier ideal that a cleric should not be a requirement for play. Like a few other recent changes, it’s a shift to a clear ideal of what D&D is, but with the promise of huge flexibility for the DM to do whatever they want. I have all my normal concerns about how shifting, say, the need for healing is a fundamental change with many repercussions, and that making such a big change seem like a simple dial to turn won’t work out well. But instead let’s take another look at...