The Gaming Den

If you have a monster generation system that produces reasonable numbers for the level of the monster, then you can just have a lookup table of those numbers as a function of level, and another table that says N creatures can attack as a single creature Y levels higher. Ideally the lookup table woul...

Druid- I dunno The big thing for 4E druid summons are "instinctive actions". Every druid summon has a little script that it follows if you don't give it a command. Some of them have things like "attack the nearest prone creature" others have "move adjacent to the caster&quo...

Yes, I used "Trap" because it most closely resembled what I was going for. It also confuses the shit out of people because the 5,000 words I've written to explain how the idea I'm working with is an expansion of the 3e trap idea has had absolutely no effect. I think it doesn't help that y...

The problem is that "allies" and "enemies" are stupid ways to refer to "targets of your choice". If it's meant to exclude you, then it should say "can't target self" or something.

the word "ally" is too loaded. Is a traitor an ally?

K it feels like you're trolling, because you're demanding an extremely precise measure of "no extraordinary builds, amazing rolls, or specific ability selections should need to be made." As far as I'm concerned, an environment conducive to kiting is just as specific an assumption as assumi...

oh wow, it really does sound like that, oops. Two separate concepts have gotten mixed together because I was discussing the Same Game Test and PC's vs. monsters. K seems to think that monsters have to be equally and exactly powered against every PC they face, or else you have no idea if the monster ...

The Same Game Test relies on being able to figure out if a monster can be defeated by a PC of a certain level, but that is always going to give bad data on a bear. A 1st level PC can kill an epic bear if that PC has a bow and enough arrows, but that doesn't mean that an epic bear is an appropriate ...

Letting monsters pick up weaknesses means that you can't ever actually playtest them. The CR 7 Dire Bear is always going to lose to the CR 7 Dragon and the level 7 archer even when it has melee attacks powerful enough to one-shot them. That's a playtesting failure. There is no way to figure out the...

1. It makes it impossible to playtest the power levels of monsters. I don't see it. You can still playtest, it would just be official that a level 7 Dragon is a more interesting and powerful monster than a level 7 Dire Bear. And there's no amount of strength or dex that you can give the Dire Bear t...

So there's a concept on display here that I've been mulling over. And that's the part where benefits have to be bought off with handicaps. The PC generation system has to produce characters who can at least nominally pass the SGT, but I don't see why monsters need to do the same. Closet trolls are t...

Obligatory "Have you thought about Linux?" comment. I borked the Windows license on my laptop and decided to try Linux before shelling out for a new Windows license. I've been reasonably happy with it. The trick with Linux is doing due dilligence to find the distribution that works for you...

It's illegal to cheat at a casino (marked cards, shaved dice, etc) but counting cards isn't cheating.

It's annoying that you have to use an extension for this, but the New Tab Redirect! (*sigh* yes, with exclamation point) extension will let you set an arbitrary new tab page (including about:blank). I've never used chrome as my primary browser. But it's nice to use for web games and such because of ...

There are two things going on with 3rd edition. A significant portion of 3e is just rewritten 2e (or not, a lot of the spells are direct copy-paste jobs) so it's not surprising that 3e Giants are so similar to prior Giants. But 3e also was trying to clean up a lot of mess, and implement system level...

I know and agree. The designers clearly wanted a hill giant to have 7 levels in "giant" and fight 7th level parties, but they also were just as clearly clearly disappointed by what their monster generation system said a level 7 giant was. So they ended up cludging the whole issue by saying...

I mean, the game is literally just worse off in every way for giving Sahuagin and Harpies "monstrous humanoid" hit dice instead of levels in Warrior.

Giants are pretty much the ur example of what's wrong with the D&D monster system. Especially the conflict between wanting to have similar mosters at different CR's but not wanting to have the MM full of stat blocks for the same monster pushed up and down the advancement tree. Giants are intelli...

I can't tell if you guys are not noticing it on purpose or not, but the Xambrians are literally Harry Potter.

And what Mistborn is saying is don't make it so that characters are vastly better when using a specific weapon. If a fighter can use a bow to the maximum of bow using without blowing a bunch of feats and can use a sword to maximum swording, then he can use a sword whenever he wants, except when he ...

It's not the melee exclusive fighter that's the problem, it's the archery-exclusive fighter that causes trouble. Specifically, the 3.X paradigm in which an archer is expected to spend the majority of his feats to boost RoF and buy off penalties to get an attack action with a damage output relatively...

I'm coming to the opinion that balancing things for combat should always start with the parameters of the combat minigame. If you force players to spend feats and skills to on a combat tactic it doesn't "balance" the tactic, it just penalizes those characters within some entirely separate ...

The background fluff is pretty quirky- dragons can only breed if they have the 'blessing' of Bahamut or Tiamat. They can lay eggs even if they don't, but those eggs hatch into dragonborn. And in some worlds, those dragonborn have interbred and effectively formed their own species. (one where the pa...

That's... actually a highly defensible position. So long as the Giant Hairy Cock that you summon with Summon Giant Hairy Cock has the exact same stats as the ones encountered in the wild. I'm actually extremely puzzled by this position. The level 10 wizard PC isn't going to be exactly the same stat...

No, Phonelobster is right. Druid + Animal Companion + Summon Nature's Ally = "And now, for my third turn of the round". It's pretty much unendurable if the Druid player isn't really good and pre-rolling his turns, and it's the intended function of the druid, not some accidental side effect...

Now, obviously you need to make a fixed set of summoned monsters with the fact that they are summoned monsters in mind. You don't just pick a random collection of 5th level monsters to be the mooks summoned by 8th level post hoc like 3e did, because that ends up with a lot of summonable monsters th...