I could be mistaken, but the way grouping would work in the game sounds intriguing: You form a group for a specific purpose, and when the goal of the group is achieved, everyone gets their reward. (Or am I way off base here?)

Eg: You want to take a trade caravan from City A to City B. You form a Trade Group and people sign up for the various roles of the party — the rewards are placed automatically in escrow by the group leader. When the caravan reaches it’s destination, everyone gets their reward.

This would allow for a lot of realistic open-world events to occur, while streamlining the process to make it easier to form groups, and avoid certain exploitative behavior.

There’s definite benefit to having an in-print game to hand to kids, or run for kids. I don’t really think 5e is going to be it. It sounds like it will be a very nailed-down, if modular, system and nailed-down is exactly the opposite of what I want to teach kids roleplaying is about. I’ve been thinking about how great it would be to have Basic D&D in print so I can hand my kid a nice red box when he’s old enough and just say, “Here! Take this over to so-and-so’s and have fun.”

I realised I don’t have to hang that future moment on Wizards getting their head out of their (read: Hasbro’s) collective asses and putting their vault back into print, though. There’s lots of stuff in print that’s not put out by them. Labyrinth Lord would be what I’d hand him if I had to choose now, but we’ll see when the time comes.

“So is the official 3e word that there is no mechanic to determine NPC/monster reactions? Not only is there no morale there’s no encounter reaction chart. Are we really reverting to the days of ‘all encountered monsters attack on sight and fight till dead?’ You’d think there would be guidelines as to monster aggressiveness if nothing else – it’s fine to say “no mechanic, DM fiat” but it’d be nice to have some kind of backup info with which to make an informed decision. And what about normal non-monster NPC reaction rolls? Can’t find those either. I guess I understand why Charisma is now officially less important than Strength (per the create-your-own-race rules). ”

So apparently I’ve always loved morale. Forgot about this since it’s from so long ago.