If you want D&D Next to be something that appeals to you...

You should let WotC know what you want from it. WotC is getting a lot of feedback. However, it tends to be from those who played and enjoyed 4e, because those are the people who frequent their message boards. I for one am worried that this feedback will lead WotC to make something that resembles 4e much more again, despite the fact that they have to appeal to more than just the people who play 4e to accomplish the goals they've set for themselves.

D&D Next First Impressions

I like D&D Next. There are a few things I'd like to see changed, but all in all it pretty much seems to be exactly what I thought 4th edition should have been in the first place. Personally I'm hoping that the final rules at least have the option of less hp, but in general there seems to be less than in 4e, so this is good.

I will be running a game, running the PCs myself, later today. However, I hope to find other players to playtest with as well.

Some Musings on my Monster Hill PbP

I have recently started a Play-by-Post campaign in my megadungeon, Monster Hill. As per the concept of Monster Hill, anything these players do will carryover to every time I play. So if I'm still running Monster Hill ten or twenty years in the future, I might offhandedly remark "Hey, that's the corpse of one of the first Player Characters that delved into this dungeon!"

A few interesting PCs include Zaggle'Bo, the goblin cave druid and Onnam the Guide wood elf cleric of Hades (I have decided to use real world deities for the humans in this campaign). They seem to be developing goals that might just have a strong impact on the course of the campaign. This is, to remove the corruption of Monster Hill. Ironically, this corruption comes largely from portals to Hell, Hades and the Abyss. Hades of course, lives on the plane of Hades, albeit on Pluton not Oinos to which the portal leads.

They are soon due to encounter some bandits. They have already encountered an orcish slave of the bandits in a cave which serves as a stable for the bandits. The pool in this cave is sometimes inhabited by faeries with powers of healing, a reference to the Legend of Zelda series.