The Gaming Den

WotC are just a bunch of morons when it comes to anything online. They seriously think that a monthly fee to use a character generator is something people are willing to pay. I don't know who in marketing came up with that ridiculously stupid idea, but someone really needs to tell them that they're...

Closer analogy would be those Fortune Cards (which gave you powers in addition to your class abilities, and which you were allowed to build a "sideboard" with), but I have no clue saleswise how those went.

Part of the business model was "sell plastic shit", so game development may hinge on commodities (expensive oil = go "gridless" and/or card-based, cheap oil = continue with something 3e/4e-ish). Not sure how boardgames are going to overlap with the RPG at all, other than it gives...

I haven't played Command and Colors. I know that when you pull a card saying you can execute an action with a Medium unit, that's very similar to WoF's limitations: there's an arbitrarily short list of things you can do. Does CaC model uncommanded actions? As in, a unit engaged in melee with anothe...

Tactical reductionism has absolutely nothing to do with WoF. Tactics reduce. Speaking of reductionism, note that by this logic every wargame ever is tactically uninteresting because none of them use WoF. You could make the argument that units in wargames have small numbers of options available to t...

The "Free Parking kitty" was never used as a pretext to substantially modify the rulebook/components and attempt to sell you an update of the same game. There were "collector's editions" of course but whatever. Diplomacy is an example of substantial variants (Colonial Dip, Machia...

My personal reason for not-butthurt-getting over loss of agency in WoF: There are already RPGs that feature an "activation roll" in order to use fixed abilities (thinking of SR and RM spellcasting as immediate examples). I'm not seeing a lot of functional difference between making your SR ...

I have problems understanding why RPGs can't just be like Monopoly, Battleship etc. and remain unchanging gaming fixtures. Probably because those games are really boring and only survive by inertia. Mind, inertia is pretty goddamn strong market force, but you have to get inertia before you have ine...

Except Monopoly has changed it rules several times since it was first made. The official Parker Brothers rules and board remained largely unchanged from 1936-2008. If we're being generous then I guess we can call 1974-2011 for D&D the "1903-1936 period for Monopoly", but there doesn't...

You can have well-balanced things and just live with the fact that some things won't be perfect and won't get fixed until the next edition. I mean, if CCGs and MMOs are willing to do updates every few months to balance things, I don't know why TTRPGs can't do the same. If your rules set exists on t...

Dragon Age works like this, and that is about the best and most popular part of an otherwise rather poorly done system. It does work fine and no one really seems to complain about it. There is a lot of complaining about Top Decking though - the maneuvers at each tier are so unbalanced that in most ...

Its a solution, but I just feel there are better solutions that tackle those issues head-on: I'd love to hear them. At this point this statement is just empty rhetoric because we've asked people repeatedly what should be done instead. And the response is just to bleat 'there's got to be a better wa...

No min max build I`ve ever seen makes the game easy. All of them just make the game play more complex, and allow them to compete against optimized encounters, or completely break the game into unplayable. Playing the Wish and the Word is not an easy game, it`s not a game at all. Playing an optimize...

So I'm just wondering... if 4E D&D's mechanics actually worked how they wanted to but they just kept the broad style changes (universal powers, magical item showers, elimination of LW/QW, non-monster/player transparency, etc.), how much of the playerbase do you think that they would have lost a...

"My personal bias against 'killer builds' is that I don't like easy games[...] If you can win the game before it even starts via a particular build, that's kind of a boner kill for me." (quoting myself from another conversation I had about this recently) I guess I can refine that a bit: I ...

I wasn't aware of this either. Still, a 25 HP first level goblin just does not compute. Something is wrong. It's "1st level" in the 4e time-management sense. If you're fighting in a level-appropriate encounter, then by definition everything is supposed to have one-shot-drop resistance, ex...

How about "never kick a player out." Fuck that noise. They're pretty much assuming that everyone you game with is a bro IRL. So if you generally get into campaigns via email lists, FLGS ad boards etc., play with a bunch of people you've never met, and are more concerned about getting your...

wait so what makes the "flyers are a bitch" specifically apply to 4e? what would an earlier edition rogue, fighter, or barbarian do? Fly (the spell) would normally come online at the start of the sweet spot, which is technically where 4e is supposed to begin (the rule of thumb I use is lv...

Hippogriff, level 5 skirmisher flying mount 4200 gp Yes as noted above. 4200g = lv9 item cost, which is probably the earliest you can get relatively permanent flight (haven't gone through the entire list recently). In game terms, the PCs aren't going to have 4200g from treasure unless they save up ...

wait so what makes the "flyers are a bitch" specifically apply to 4e? what would an earlier edition rogue, fighter, or barbarian do? Fly (the spell) would normally come online at the start of the sweet spot, which is technically where 4e is supposed to begin (the rule of thumb I use is lv...

I'm still kind of floored by the notion that you shouldn't put an encounter with a dragon focused on strafing attacks, or a roc that behaves as described, into a game just because the PCs are a bunch of DMFs. Should I clarify beyond what I said? If you send a group of all fliers (Or the strafing dr...

Edit: Also you can't use immediate actions on your own turn, so the marking doesn't work. Ah right thanks. Make it "free action 1/round" or whatever. I wouldn't say that error kills it as a proof-of-concept/though experiment. The WOTC classes aren't oozing with such intrinsic flavor that ...

And indeed, there is now a Baneguard class, with full complement of powers, written out in more or less the 4e format.(...)I'll save you a length analasys, but everything about that class is terrible. It's powers lack theme, and seem to fill every role. It has a marking mechanic which literally nev...

I was going to just post saying "Why?" but, no, that makes sense, really, from a "I've lost faith in humanity" and "think of all the money we can make!" standpoint... It was their April Fools thing from a year or two ago. (I got a thread closed on the WOTC boards when ...

(pretty sure that "magic items can be sold but not bought, because only the PCs are 'stupid' enough to give them up" was a 1e rule as well; can't find a citation from the DMG at the moment though)