The Gaming Den

I would be perfectly fine with that Wait. What? Moments ago you were telling us that there was a "certain merit" (description of actual merit not included) to NOT having "experimentally testable" PC status in your game world. A "Detect PCs" spell is the most fundamenta...

"if you have this rule your game world is warped, warped I say! Without TPKs and random PC deaths you can't play serious games!". Well, you got the first half of that about right. When I play RPGs, I prefer to believe that the rules describe what happens in the game, and you can't just br...

So, apparently three negatives in the same sentence makes things confusing. I'll try again. There is a certain merit to a game where it is not possible for a character within the game to experimentally determine whether another character in that game is a PC or an NPC. If you introduce a mechanic th...

James Bond has Regeneration? PhoneLobster, thank you for choosing the most obtuse interpretation of the word "parity" in this context. I have to say, the idea that player characters are mechanically a type of creature like any other, and having "Player Control" not apply any mech...

DSMatticus wrote:there are probably multiple wannabe James Bonds' working together, not just one player.

No, of course all the other PCs are girls, who usually die. I guess Q could be controlled by a player, but he wouldn't be involved enough to be a player's sole character.

10 levels higher, huh, On a plane? So it's entirely the level 6 party's fault when I misjudged the CR system (and the power of accidentally accepted Necrotic Cysts) and killed them all with a level 11 Cleric. Well, that's a weight off my shoulders.

For the heroic adventure fantasy genre, it's genre-appropriate for heroes to occasionally die. It's almost never fine for them to die in a TPK after maybe the 10% mark, though. If you want to make TPKs effectively impossible (aside from the possibility of "we all go swimming in this lava withou...

He could do that, or he could just kill the gods (the easy part), and then go around methodically mindraping people into forgetting that divine magic ever existed, so that they wouldn't choose to become Clerics of an ideal. That wouldn't actually work. Druids and Paladins still get divine magic reg...

This thread reminds me of some ennui I experienced many years ago after reading a number of unfortunately overly formulaic books. At the time I reacted by rebelling against books with happy endings, but I've come to realize that the question "will the good guys win?" is never as intriguing...

He could do that, or he could just kill the gods (the easy part), and then go around methodically mindraping people into forgetting that divine magic ever existed, so that they wouldn't choose to become Clerics of an ideal.

You don't like intergalactic commutes?

Also, it's no farther than two Plane Shifts and a Teleport. Fixing Plane Shift would be fairly difficult.

Switching to warp-style teleportation spells would do it, though.

What you just posted looks more like what I did than any DC-related shenanigans. I'm not saying you've imitated me, rather it seems like an imitation of 3e Psionics really, but I'm wondering if what I wrote has merit as far as scale increases goes. No, sigma999. Both your system and my wordcasting ...

So, the two choices for spell improvement we've been considering lately are: Metamagic (which shouldn't be called "Metamagic" because it's slightly different from 3.5): Different spells benefit from different metamagic options to different extents. You can price metamagic such that it's ne...

I completely forgot about that one ages ago, wotmaniac, because the RNG for skills doesn't work that way in D&D, but it's actually relevant. It has a vaguely similar goal (exchanging things for other things, in an intentionally unfair way), but my system supports making one half of a deal withou...

So, I've got the beginning of a system. The objective is to arrive at a social interaction system with enough punch to it that it actually matters, but sufficient leeway to let players be the ones who define their characters' personalities. ----------------------------------------------- Every creat...

So, how does this "top of your head" method differ from: Enlarge Spell Metamagic Option (It doesn't necessarily cost a feat) : The spell's range increases from Touch->Close->Medium->Long->1 mile/level->Infinite->Any Plane. The spell counts as one level higher than normal. Enlarge can be ap...

What if damaging spells didn't scale? Like, at all. Range, area, effect, everything. They'd do a set amount of damage, in combination of dice and a static bonus, and players would simply have to upgrade to better spells in order to keep up with their opposition. The ugly part about that is the bit ...

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicOverview/arcaneSpells.htm#recentCastingLimitRestInterruptions[/url]]If the character does not need to sleep for some reason, she still must have 8 hours of restful calm before preparing any spells. It seems I can't use modified url names inside the quote start tag. So...

sigma999 wrote:Some of my friends are staunch grognards that get butthurt about things as minor as beardless dwarf women, and I ignore that.

That's not a grognard; that's a fan of Terry Pratchett.

I agree with your Fireball scaling, sigma999. As a third level spell, Fireball isn't all that great of a spell to cast when you could be casting any other spell instead, but its Long range and 20 foot blast radius mean that there are plenty of times when you couldn't be casting any other spell inste...

It took a while to read this (that and the lack of a descriptive introduction made me put it off), but in the end it's a fairly straightforward build-a-spell ruleset. I see that you go for generalizations in your spell components; this handles the problem that build-a-spell usually has, where it sti...

Double fire damage is also not much of a weakness on fire immune creatures.

I'm pretty sure that the statements by the actual leaker are not marked with a '>'.

You missed 5. No stupid "made of metal and stone" nonsense. 6. None of this ridiculous "built, not born" jibber-jabber. Okay, that was a bit hyperbolic. I actually approve of #1 and #4, and I'm sure there's a more elegant type possible than Living Construct for a robot, but #3 ma...

Well, it's at least amusing that he managed to pick the least problematic Polymorph spell.