The Gaming Den

Quanta: the problem with saying "an interesting decision among six at-wills is enough" is that it's unlikely for much to change over the course of an eight-round combat. So on the first round you figure out which one of these is best. And then the second round you look at your list, and, ...

I really don't think tightly defined power set ups are at all amenable to a situation where it's not obvious that a few distinct powers are optimal in a given situation. Seriously, most of the options paralysis I've seen was when people only had 4-6 discrete choices. I think to some extent it must b...

Part of that, too, is that both games have entropy. In Chess, the number of pieces on the board only ever goes down. In Go, it trends upward. You can break up five moves of doom, if necessary, by having the tactical situation available depend on your current hit points, for instance, and dramatical...

Part of that, too, is that both games have entropy. In Chess, the number of pieces on the board only ever goes down. In Go, it trends upward. You can break up five moves of doom, if necessary, by having the tactical situation available depend on your current hit points, for instance, and dramatical...

I should not need to metagame by telling myself the DM will equal out the cash we find no matter what I spend it on -- assuming the DM is clueful enough to even do that -- in order to justify blowing money on booze and whores rather than saving my pennies for a Helm of Brilliance. No, you should ju...

Why is there no "deck search" mechanic for your moves as is in the CCGs that this system is supposed to imitate? For all the CCGs, I've played the reason "deck search" is not so good an idea is this. It's hard to thread the needle and not end up with either A) Like 1/5-1/4 of a ...

Give me five minutes with your moms, and we can all be sad.

(weren't there also ways to effectively gain progression in both Wizard and Cleric at the same time). Most of those were a trap though. Giving up three caster levels on one side wasn't really worth it (Mystic Theurge). Granted, you could sometimes cheese your way around the problem and there were s...

As much as I really should have everyone in this entire thread on ignore (including myself), you're not.

But thanks.

You're welcome.

Also, in honor of this thread, my next 4e game will have Ultra-Super-Mega Chicken, bards destroying doors through mockery, and Timmy, the new god of the sun.

Wow, I can't believe this thread got even dumber.

And I think you could come up with answers in 3e, but it's going to take a calculator, and it's going to be really simulation breaking considering how as far as I can tell, you don't breathe any faster if you're digging compared to if you're sitting still. I also can't find the rules on how fast ti...

Wow, that's pretty funny actually. I mean, it's almost exactly the opposite of what I stand for, but it is frickin hilarious. I mean, in reality I produce my stuff open source and for free and reject the ownership by authors of their products - including ownership by me of things I have personally ...

It's insane to consider energy as a meaningful restriction in D&D. I'm pretty sure there's got to be at least one way to set up a perpetual motion machine with a couple spells and some simple mechanical gadgets in 3e. You may even be able to do it in 4e if you reach outside of core for the reall...

The problem with your argument ROLL 1d6, 1. Lago 2. Plebian 3. Psychic Robot 4. Frank 5. Tzor 6. Someone Else (see subchart) Is that ROLL 1d6 1. "You ignored my point entirely, I still want an answer" 2. "It's hardly unique to 3e/4e, that's a problem in your favorite edition too"...

Because he`s actually a banned Darwinism with a new account posting again, and if you`ll recall, Darwinism looked up versimilitude in some online dictionary and decided that it doesn`t mean what it means because the definition in an online dictionary doesn`t match, because he`s actually 14 and so u...

For a guy that acknowledges CR doesn't make sense, you sure do seem to want to use it. You do realize BD&D doesn't have CR, right? So, again, using CR doesn't make sense twice over, again. I'm not that guy. And it's better to use the approximate guidelines for 3rd and 4th than to just... pick s...

I don't really get the point. Fucking everyone has more HP (and probably better AC) at level 1 in 4e. That alone will significantly increase the number of goblins you can kill if you beat them up one at a time. The post may as well be titled "1st level 4e characters generally more powerful than...

A roughly unified power system is a good idea. It doesn't have to be perfectly unified. Frank's examples of different usage amounts of the same resource (or a tradeoff between two resources) is still way more unified than 3e. Fighters don't use any resources besides actions (except when attacked), a...

We use the word verisimilitude to refer to things that are consistent with the expectations of the genre and things previously established about the setting, the events, and the characters. When we use the word verisimilitude, w are referring explicitly to that. We use that word instead of "re...

I know I'm being trolled, but fuck this stawman. When we say, that 4E doesn't make an ounce of sense, we're not arguing for "realism", we're arguing for verisimilitude. You know, stuff like internal consistency, believability and system actually interfacing with the world. Which is totall...

Honestly, fuck criticals. They've only once been awesome for my players when I was a newb DM, and I was really lucky one of my players critted at the exact time I was about to accidentally TPK (I don't fudge. I was new. Shut up.) That was my one lucky pass. I doubt the mechanic will ever serve me we...

It's not. Winds of Fate reduces the effect of specialization (because you're forced to use other powers) and gets people out of the habit of Five Moves of Doom. Does it eliminate it? No. But it has a much higher tolerance for people constructing Killer Combos than any other type of system. This inc...

If you're going to change the abilities so much then why even keep the same names? It's just needless confusion to have a level 12 Cleave and a level 18 Whirlwind Attack. A more sensible progression would be cleave just auto upgrades to great cleave, and then great cleave plus an extra attack per c...

4E had a blatantly inferior option (At-Wills) that were often cheesed out so that they ended up better than a lot of daily and encounter powers. So even though a character had a bunch of Dailies/Encounters, people keep/kept spamming the At-Will option after they were able to pile on enough abilitie...

4E tried an even simpler model than this where 'rock' (At-Will powers) were downright worse than paper and scissors and it still didn't work. What it ended up doing was people stacking as many modifiers onto rock as they could get and beating everyone even if they picked 'rock' all of the time. The...