The Gaming Den

TheFlatline wrote: In other words, I want PACKS for D&D and most of my other games that get to the table.

Christ, I'd pay 200 bucks out of my own pocket for a decent, functioning PACKS system for Dark Heresy.

What's a PACKS system?

After that, Mike Mearls went on to make a dozen more failed Skill Challenge overhauls. That is not a joke: seriously a dozen. The problem is that Mike Mearls doesn't know what the fuck he is doing and insists that him just fucking around and crapping out shitty experimental material is his right an...

Hey, base party size in AD&D was around 8. Go and read the old modules to see; in the 1979 DMG, a 'wandering monster' party of adventurers had a number of NPCs with levels (all randomly determined, of course), with men-at-arms to make up the party to 9. Yeah 1E/2E assumed you were playing with ...

The only requirement to be roleplaying is to make decisions for your character. Using diplomacy is a decision you made, your character tries to make what he wants to do sound reasonable and the king is either swayed by the character's argument or not. Do you penalize players for giving shitty reaso...

I've signed up, but to preview the material rather than actually provide feedback. Given their track record on listening to feedback I'm not sure the difference matters anyways. Same here. I want to see what direction they're taking D&D and see if it's in a direction that I remotely even care a...

His conclusion is "at level 20, D&D characters can do crazy shit", and you're questioning that? His conclusion is something specific about diplomacy, where high level characters get faster at diplomacy as they level up to the point of being able to diplomacy someone near instantaneous...

Playable without houserules I don't want crazy broken powers in the game that you have to house rule or they completely dominate. Dudes, make up your minds While 4E had flaws, it had some kind of direction. They wanted a basic LotR dungeon crawling game and they made one. The new edition needs to m...

But the big thing I'm expecting is that the high end stuff is just going to be shit thrown at a wall. In the dark, so even the writers don't know if anything stuck. Bilsand wrote all of his monsters out to the Monster Manual Fucking 3 without actually ever playing an Epic Game. This is almost a giv...

I mean, Wormtongue did it. Wormtongue presumably has a level, which we'll call X. In 3.x terms, power roughly doubles every 2 levels. Let's assume a direct relationship between diplomancer power and time required to achieve results. Let's further say it takes Wormtongue six months of work to do his...

Doesn't matter. Their forums are clogged up with contradictory and conflicting design goals, meaning people aren't going to get what they want and the playtest results will be a big pile of fuck. At this point, the D&D playerbase is so split that I don't think it's even possible to bring them b...

As to bonuses for well reasoned arguments. That's why you're only giving out a bonus and not requiring them for the game. But that's just the problem. Once you introduce any level of arbitrary diplomacy where you convince someone without a reason, you toss well reasoned arguments out the window. Yo...

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Why the fuck do Bruce Cordell and Mike Mearls still have jobs?!?!

I wonder the same thing about Monte Cook.

I mean fuck, man. Why on earth do you care what contortions of rhetoric the bard used? The important thing is that the king now has a specific belief. So you want to know how to play him? You play him as though he has that fucking belief. Then, if they want to change his mind, they roll Diplomacy -...

Which was the entire point I was making. I even specifically said that how effective or ineffective it is is based entirely on the people you're playing with, and power level of the campaign. The reason people insisted for years that fighters were fine was because they played inefficiently and ofte...

Which of those feats are in the fucking SRD? Since when are we limited to the SRD? Just to support the original strawman argument for the theoretical unoptimized character built solely to have a bunch of mediocre options and otherwise suck? This whole conversation has just gotten ridiculous, becaus...

As an aside, I like to give out bonuses to rolls for well reasoned arguments. The problem is that you really don't even need well reasoned arguments based on how social skills work. I mean you're having a king (possibly a good aligned king) pretty much go along with genocide with no evidence at all...

But you know what? I like for the PCs to be able to talk to people, and in a system where social-fu works like this - they fucking can't . In a world where any random bystander could have the skills to trade a turnip for a kingdom, nobody gets to talk to the king, any more than they'd be allowed to...

You know why the king decided to an unreasonable request: the Bard made it sound reasonable somehow. The somehow really is unimportant. Just 'cause you don't have a detailed answer to "what's my motivation" doesn't mean you aren't roleplaying. No, that motivation is absolutely important t...

Really? You wonder that? What could he possibly be spending the feats on when he just laid out what he could be spending the feats on. It's hard to take you seriously Slinger. Dodge, Expertise, Mobility, Spring Attack, Whirlwind Attack, Power Attack, Cleave, Improved Trip, Improved Disarm, Improved...

I think Rich Burlew of GitP said it best: when you describe how you character decapitates the hydra with his vorpal sword, that's role-playing. When your bard convinces the king with diplomacy to negotiate for peace, that too is role-playing. A large emphasis of D&D is on combat, but you can to...

However, even given just the SRD to build a fighter at 15th level only using feats, I've got the option to move and attack, full attack, spring attack, whirlwind, trip (with improved trip), disarm, sunder, bull rush, overrun, charge, fight defensively, make extra AoOs and Cleave. That's also before...

I think Skyrim shows that even if your game's magic system has many problems, even if a great number of the rules don't actually work (i.e., bugs), even if there's disparity between classes and some skill trees are ridiculously more powerful than others...the game can still be wildly popular as lon...

It's also a question of market, though. Roulette was big many decades ago, but it's fallen to videogame-ish slots. Most casinos have a few roulette wheels...and thousands of slot machines. Well slots are pretty much the same level of tactically boring as roulette anyway. So if you want to use slots...

As a general rule, PCs should not be stupider than their players. If the player can think of it, then so can the PC. The DM doesn't get to respond to a clever plan with "no, your character is too stupid to think of that". The thing to remember is that players do not want to challenge thei...

What I'm afraid of is that 10 years of that paradigm discrepancy for magic users has made it a scared cow. I don't know. People are generally okay with spells getting nerfed, as evident by Pathfinder's popularity. So long as you keep their vancian spell level system and the spell list from other ed...