• Reflective metallic silver, like a ball bearing.
• genderless
• a mannequin silhouette
• about the size of a large grape? Like a superball.
• my wooden dining room table, background and all.

The focus seemed to be on picturing the table and ball, and the person pushing it was irrelevant other than to provide motive force, so I didn’t spend any time to fill in their details.

Having played all the editions in the comic, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that 4e is unfairly maligned and I would rather play it over Advanced 2e or 3.5.

The powers system gets bloated fast, but offloading potentially broken support spells and powers into 10min to 1 hour rituals is genius. 4e has the only useful version of Pyrotechnics between the listed editions.

Short Rests being 5 min instead of 1 hour really feels like the pace of encounters keeps up without any awkward pauses, and means encounter powers are reliably up by the next fight.

The understanding that mechanical roles and flavor power sources could be swapped around and make a bunch of classes instead of trying to theme classes solely around fantasy archetypes let them have greater design freedom.

Short rests and powers attached to them, subclasses being a core part of the basic classes, ritual casting, at-will basic spells for casters, & proto-advantage in some class abilities are all extracted from 4e.

5e isn’t bad - its arguably the best version of D&D. But I’ve seen a lot better fantasy systems than D&D, and some fantastic mechanics left on the cutting room floor between NEXT and 5e.

I have heard the ‘4e was MMO edition’ critique multiple times and not once has anyone been able to articulate why 4e was specifically like WoW in a way that wasn’t outright false or was so broadly similar that it applied to nearly all fantasy RPGs, electronic or tabletop.

Or he could have some clause in the contract that prevents him from bypassing the publisher for profit, or maybe he just doesn’t want the game to disappear and has a clause that lets him give away copies so he’s free and clear. It isn’t necessarily piracy. You asked how he could do this, I’m just spitballing possible answers.

I think he still owns the game. His publisher is the one delisting it.