The Gaming Den

deaddmwalking wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 23, 2021 4:55 pm

In 5th edition, dragons die when a group of 20 1st-level archers attack.

Indeed, you switch to 5th edition for this observation, because in 3rd then AC actually performs that same function well enough.

Spending hit points and spending spell slots work similarly as secondary resources in that way, making it so that you're generally more effective at the start of combat but may have to sit out the ending part.

I see a lot of system suggestions here that don't distinguish between a chunky metal breastplate and a full-body leather suit

Well, I can't think of any tabletop games that do both at once great, but to clarify: the ideal is that armor is most effective against a shower of poorly aimed light attacks, and it can be bypassed with attacks that are either: sufficiently strong to just go right through, especially if it's thin; ...

Pretty much every class is over towards the Action Economy side of that dichotomy. Even the wizard, who may well choose not to cast any spells on some turns in order to be more efficient, will start wishing for more standard actions when the going gets rough more than they wish for more spell slots.

It's not magical. It's destroying the memory, which defies natural physics, but essentially the same as a spell in result. I'll try to put it this way: visualize yourself in the place of the sword guy, imagine what it would feel like to destroy someone's memory with a sword slash. Probably somethin...

Being able to no-sell a standard action ability used by a creature 10 levels above you is an iffy thing in D&D, there are a lot of considerations involved, probably enough to be worth making a new thread about...

Attack concept (Bard spell Modify Memory) At this point it's gone from swordplay to wordplay. I'm not convinced that connecting all of a character's abilities to their sword is actually more appealing to the fantasy of a master fighter guy than just giving them some magic powers on the side. Isn't ...

JonSetanta wrote: ↑

Sat Sep 11, 2021 8:35 am

I'll elaborate.
An NPC party consisting of a Paladin, a Cleric, Rogue, and Wizard.
Using the item was literally a suboptimal choice in the middle of combat, as I proved to the players.

This message contains no new relevant information.

I showed this to some players by giving an NPC party one, a staff that did this, and the NPCs still lost. When the players discovered what the item did, half of them shouted at me for "custom item bullshit" and "munchkin gaming", and voted to replace me as DM. I mean, putting in...

Yeah actually it's a bit weird to me still how the wand of CLW snuck in there... in core if you don't realize that healing wands are super cheap, you'll get a totally different impression about what healing is worth. When I first played, I was surprised to discover that health potions were so overpr...

Standardizing well-known core content using homebrew doesn't actually make the game simpler. The players already know what Cure Wounds, LOH, and Turn Undead do, then you introduce your standardization and they have to learn another thing. Now, if you were to write your own game system, then your sim...

There's always Mutants & Masterminds, which lets you buy up to your "cap" to be level-appropriate very easily and then allows you to make some slight tradeoffs between attack and damage or whatever. Then of course other parts of character creation go immediately into crazy town but at ...

If stats don't matter, why have them? No, seriously. Why? Yes, ability scores (except Strength) are quite pointless mechanically, the ways you allocate them to be optimized are rather trivial and attempts at making more ability score distributions be useful only briefly make them more interesting, ...

Yeah, Gempunks uses a d6 instead of a d20 and nothing much of value is lost.

How much damage is a 1 round stun worth? Or put another way, if you were 100% certain that you would deal x damage or stun your opponent for one round (but not both), how big would x have to be before you might choose the damage option. It's okay to answer as a percentage of the opponent's hit poin...

Oh no, I'm so sorry! I guess I've forgotten how to do math

+20 from BAB, +10 from Strength, +5 from magic weapon, voila you're hitting the Balor and Tarrasque on a 1.

AC numbers in 3.5 are usually set up that if you don't sacrifice any of your fight guy attack bonus, you quickly start to approach 95% hit chance (with crits bringing expected damage/attack to a bit over 100% potentially). What I'd be more worried about is writing a metastrike that accidentally dram...

True, my math IQ is 90, and I have an active life outside of RPGs. If you can't/don't want to really understand the mathematical nuances of dpr by level, all your attempts at making a class based on doing large but specific amounts of damage with the option of metastrikes that change the amount of ...

deaddmwalking wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 27, 2021 9:05 pm

Touch Strike [3d6] - Resolve your attack as a touch attack.

Is there a reason you made a class who could only effectively damage enemies with a low touch AC?

You got rid of Sweep Strike, but decided to include Centered Strike... what does this mean?!? Have you mathed out the different ways a Paragon can fight? How does it compare to the combat abilities of existing tome-scale damage dealers, like, uh... Fire Mage, Icewright, flask Rogue, maybe some kind ...

Oh wait, the other thing, multiple attacks. The best part of multiple attacks is stealing someone's sword, stabbing them with it, and then throwing it at another enemy. But that's never happened in D&D, and only rarely happens in Gempunks which is designed to favor that sort of strategy a lot mo...

Sweep Strike deeply confuses me. Isn't this entire conversation supposed to be about considering different mathematical relationships between focus-firing one enemy and splitting attacks between multiple enemies? Why would you write Sweep Strike at all if you hadn't completely forgotten what the Dea...

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