Is anyone running a game here yet? It would be a good one to follow, as I'd like to see how the interaction works here and in person.

WotC expressly forbids PbP testing, unfortunately. Whether or not, or how, they would enforce it is unknown, as is whether or not the MW higher ups would allow a game.

I know it's nitpicky but that's not entirely true. You can run PbP, it just has to be on the WotC site:

"Can I run an online game via email, Skype, Google Hangout or a play-by-post forum?

No, you may not run an online game on third parties sites at this time."

I will be, though I haven't got my group together yet. There's enough to start with. I'm interested to see how survivable 1st level is.

Ah, right, RotatingPanda. In my mind I had cemented "not on MW" to "nothing by PbP".

That's just silly.

I'm eager to hear how a group does with the new system. If there is a WotC group running a pbp, it would be good to see the blow-by-blow action.

Dunno why, but something about the title made me think of this:

"Cave Johnson here. Now it's come to my attention that we've been getting some people coming in here from parallel universes for some reason, something about test chambers for portal technology. I dunno what they're yammering about - quantum tunnels, cake, sounds like a bad sci-fi puzzle game. We here at Aperture Game Science are here for just one thing - testing role-playing games. Let those jackasses over at Black Mesa handle the puzzlers. If you see these multiverse travellers around, just hammer on the north wall of your test chamber and we'll start flooding the room with some tear gas we conned out of the guys testing that new version of d20 Modern. I know it'll sting a bit but you champ's've gotta bear it! For Game Science!

Alright now get back to testing that new version DnD, the suits from Wizards are breathing down our necks on this one. Cave Johnson, we're done here."

I've probably been using the community-made test chambers in Portal 2 a bit too much lately.

OT: I've had a look through the playtest rules - skipped over 4e for Pathfinder, but DnD Next is looking pretty good so far.

I'm hoping to get a game together with some of the guys here at Bagram to try it out.

One thing that makes me optimistic is that players of both 3.X and 4e are liking a lot of what they see.

The caves of chaos looks hella fun - but, so far, I only feel like playing the dwarf fighter.

No info has been given on class creation. I don't know where people are getting information about 'backgrounds' or 'themes'. From what I gather, themes are just 'extra feat' and backgrounds are nifty bonuses that may or may not contain a feat too.

It looks interesting - though I don't like how large creatures take up 1.5 spaces instead of two and collossal creatures are 3 instead of 5. Was that put in there just to facillitate surrounding rules? Shouldn't a collossal creature surround a smaller creature, just by stepping over it?