The Gaming Den

A modern game will involve a significant amount of shooting people, possibly in the face, with guns. D20 modern makes the mistake of saying “guns are ranged, use dexterity”. In a game with firearms, the man holding a sword looks foolish. And in a game without spell effects, points spent on Wisdom lo...

Moses walks up to Pharaoh and uses his God's magic to turn his walking stick into a snake, then Pharaoh's magicians walk up and use their magic to turn their sticks into snakes. Then Moses' snake eats their snakes, proving that his godmagic is superior, not that he's the only one with godmagic.

The problem still comes down to mechanical analysis won't fix your problem which is that you're not willing to follow through on killing your players when they ignore your giant flashing "Don't fight this, it will kill you" signs. There's no real difference in making a game where a d8+5 ca...

So if you believe Skip's interpretation (a big "if"), then it's not a stretch to say that a force effect can grapple an incorporeal creature. I find myself (gag) siding with Skip's interpretation. The answer to those kinds of questions is "We wrote the rules assuming everyone was pla...

Change the "Casting stat" for different weapons: Big Guns = Strength Fast Guns = Dex Explosives = Int Rifles = Wis Con is a generally boring stat that's vital to keeping you alive. "Trying to stay alive" is not a character archetype. Charisma isn't so much a stat as an ambient so...

Seahorse + Mole Rat = A giant "hive" of tunnels with a small/singular number of Queens that birth a litter of joeys, each of which is transferred to a male's pouch.

Superior Defense is a scaling bonus +2/4/6 at heroic/paragon/epic

but it also requires 15 wis/con/dex for will/fort/ref, so it's more of a "make an already good NAD stratospheric" more than a "shore up a poor NAD".

You could be playing Bunnies and Burroughs or Champions. Or regular vanilla, unmodified D&D. Fucking with the rules is completely orthogonal to that goal. If you can't get people to shiver a bit with your description of the bone yard, it's because you personally suck as a storyteller. Easily th...

That seriously doesn't work. GnG is seriously designed to murderate people at the drop of a hat. If you don't want GnG to murder people at the drop of a hat then you're going to have to pull your punches all the time or they will die at the drop of a hat . Let's take the real world as an example: pe...

I guarantee you will not accomplish what you're looking to accomplish. The only way to make players fear for their character's lives truly and honestly is to constantly murderate them . It doesn't matter the system, but if PC's generally survive encounters, then players will assume they'll survive t...

Or, in other words, even if it's "modern" it's still d20, and in d20 system you solve problems through murder. And in the modern era you murder people with a gat. Unless you get to some weird Dune style personal forcefields that stop bullets and blow up like a nuke when shot with a laser g...

You get a critical failure if you don't have enough hits to succeed AND you have more ones than hits. This means that you have a better chance of succeeding if you've got more dice (more dice=more chances for hits). But you've also got more chances of rolling 1's, and eventually you can be rolling e...

It's not that something different is happening every time, it's that "the scientific method" breaks down when observations can't be repeated. The cause will never be discovered because the cause does not exist in a scientific way . The fact that I'm having such a hard time describing this ...

Zherog wrote:

Kaelik wrote:Literally every single person can see that you are retardedly wrong. Believe it or not, Maj, Robby, Ice9, Sashi, Tarxis Flux, erik, Lago, and Virgil are not all my sock puppets.

Wait! You didn't mention me. Does that make me your sock puppet?

No, you're mine.

I'm not saying that Reed Richards would just instantly give up, or even accept that Dr. Strange was doing things that it was impossible for science to explain, I'm just saying that in order for "magic" to be actually "magic" and not just "science with secrets" it litera...

Combat Casting is a trap because there exists Skill Focus: concentration. The +1 difference is absolutely blown away by the fact that you can almost always get out of having to cast defensively, but if you fight in a storm or on horseback you'll get totally hosed. Stealthy would be a trap option com...

Sometimes it feels like "Trap option" is getting devalued as a term. The "stealthy" feat isn't a trap just because +2 to hide and move silently is underwhelming. The feat explicitly achieves the goal of making you more effective at hiding and moving silently. Traps are things tha...

So here's the question: if you literally can't define magic by "violation of the universe" then what's magic? In X-men "mutant powers" are supposed to be scientific, but the only people with them are those with the "X Gene", so "mutant power" means "havin...

The problem with STRONG/FAST/SMART etc is that once you're in the "guns" paradigm the fast hero wins. Because it's rocket launcher tag all the way up.

4E doesn't have retries because it's incredibly enamored with the Skill Challenge rules and doesn't expect you to ever encounter a "locked door", instead it's a door with an intricate mechanism that requires a series of arcana, history, thievery, and stealth (?!) checks to bypass, and fail...

Fuck you.

This thread is about "what is magic?" My point is that the one thing magic cannot be is something that "violates the laws of the universe" because any universe in which people can do the "magic" things a wizard or sorcerer can do includes in it's laws that people can do...

In fiction we tend to define "magic" as "stuff that violates the laws of OUR universe" and that works FINE because WE are imagining the world. But it's also a completely impossible way for the actual people in the RPG world to think about magic that way. Because if you have obser...

I would honestly rather prefer rocks falling on people and them not being particularly hurt over horrible violence being done to humanoids but it being okay because they emit sparks and gears instead of blood and guts. Wait, actually, I don't know which of those is worse. I do know that the JLA meth...

Yeah, I felt a little dirty typing out the stats for Guts' sword, or trying to justify why I called Slan "Epic". But I don't feel bad pointing out that Kentaro Miura has kind of painted himself into a corner by turning the story into a godslayer quest while the PC's aren't actually powerfu...