On a serious note, I do love the Big Eyes Small Mouth system.

If I play D&D anymore, its back to the creators, TSR for me, WoTC has screwed this system up to the 10th power!

Can you do the equivalent of that in 3.x now?

I’m certainly afraid that this is true, but I have some hope that they’re supposedly including some very cool options within the base PHB such as a Gryphon mount, magic items, and other things we know of like Tiefling and Dragonborn as PC races, which bring a lot of what we’re discussing as “power creep” from later books into the very beginning of the game.

If they present cool enough options to start with, then when they release awesome stuff later on it should fit right in.

As far as “power creep” goes, as Graham pointed out, the general usage of the term tends to imply an overall rise in power levels. I’d argue that if you take all the bits in supplements of a whole that you’ll find more “suck creep” in the many, many sucky options for characters. Additionally, there’s plenty of stuff that was overpowered in the PHBs (3.5 is kind of weird because they had a second crack at balancing stuff in the book) so calling it a creep is difficult for me to agree with… there was a high bar to begin with.

If you take all the broken bits out of the supplements, Dave, I’d agree with you, but they tend to pile up. When brokenness becomes the mainstream, it gets very hard to right the ship, necessitating another edition. I’d even agree with the “refinement” theory…if DMs were the only ones who bought supplements. The fact is, I’d estimate that half of all RPG material are bought by players, instead of DMs (though I could be wildy off, having no figures to support this theory). In the main, these players are looking for advantages for their characters. The writers are looking to feed these customers too, so these “broken” bits keep creeping in, or supplements like Tome of Battle or Players Advantage: Combat get published. And let’s not forget about other publishers! In an effort to get their sales niche, many of them use the system and add on even more powerful items and powers, as well. It’s not wrong, it’s just good business sense, but it doesn’t help my game. And 4th Edition will be no different, it’ll just be a new set of challenges.

To differentiate it, power creep is also an across-the-board increase in power.

Power creep is a constant (usually slow) steady increase in power. A single jump in brokenness for one combo is bad, but is not power creep.

I’ve enjoyed what we’ve played of Keep on the Shadowfell so far, but not enough to judge it as a whole. I’ll be very surprised if it’s a “joke” though. And maybe it’s because of my publishing experience, but $30 for 96 color pages, the folio covering, and poster maps doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.