The Gaming Den

Uh... that is probably the most stupid fucking thing that anyone who isn't Shadzar has ever said. Boring is boring. Taking the same action six times in a row against the same enemy is boring . Untrue. There are different kinds of boring. People can very well get into casino games like roulette wher...

RadiantPhoenix wrote:So, how can we make the odds better than they look?

Fate/Action points work well for that. Giving PCs a certain edge for being PCs.

People don't use them because they are shit. Not because they aren't half the game as sold. Skill Challenges are supposed to be the entire game outside combat. There are two kinds of encounters in the whole game. The fact that one of them does not work doesn't make it "not a big deal" bec...

I realize the spells go up to 9th level, but as you've said before yourself the high level spells often don't work well. There's a definite shift around level 11 from spells that were written for PCs to bullshit plot abilities the writer never expected PCs to have. It's not that you necessarily cou...

I gotta strongly disagree. Always having something to work toward is kinda cool, but huge level caps are damaging to the game and it's not worth it. Early AD&D had an (implied) at around level 10. Around the time you got an army or Teleport or Create Undead, you were also ready to fight Lolth o...

No. It's supposed to be a roleplaying game divided into two parts: Combat challenges and Skill Challenges. Combat Challenges in 4e are extremely boring, since you end up doing the same fucking thing over and over again and even your special abilities are seriously not that different from the at-wil...

Malks are more a case of people being poor roleplayers. It's tough for a lot of people to understand insanity, and instead of portraying out some kind of mental disorder, portray their guy as some funny man who just does random things for no reason. Actual mental illnesses can be scary and dark, and...

The deaths of sacred cows are basically completely meaningless. People will flock to a system if it is better , whether sacred cows die or not. People embraced D&D3e's BAB, people embraced SR4's fixed target numbers. The deaths of sacred cows are used as post-hoc rationalizations for why people...

So how about this: people (or whatever you care about) is getting killed on another plane and you want to stop that. How do you do planar travel without magic? Afaik you can't and I do want planar travel available in dnd so in any dnd game I'd play magic / magic friend / magic items whatever is app...

@Mfa: I'm not saying all the sacred cows are necessarily unworkable, I'm just saying that D&D fans find that stuff to be very important to the product identity. Even irrationally so. Point of fact, Stupid dumbfuck Swordslinger thinks 4e killed the sacred cow of saving throws by changing who rol...

If you're going to say that conceptually inverting all the attack numbers so that AC counts up instead of down is a minor change, you have nothing meaningful to add to the discussion. Changing the mechanics so that 3 is better than 1 instead of vice versa is literally as fundamental change as it is...

Lago PARANOIA wrote: I love the whole conceit of 'because a change wasn't as huge as it could have been, it wasn't a big change at all'. It's totally not disingenuous

Conceptually you could call the change big, but as far as burning sacred cows, not so much.

3E was very cow friendly.

THAC0 was the sacred cow of pre-3rd edition D&D. It's the mechanic which gave D&D its reputation as a convoluted an math-heavy game even in far-detached sources like the Straight Dope. It was not a 2E-only invention, either. THAC0 was an invention of 2nd edition, to change 1st editions tabl...

Yeah, 3e proved you could slaughter all kinds of holy cows as long as you did it well. Even the designers were surprised at how near-universal the acceptance of their changes was. 3E really didn't slaughter many sacred cows honestly. THAC0 was never a sacred cow. It existed in 2E only. The proficie...

Do you think most campaigns stop at level 5 because people are satisfied with the level 5 experience and figure that going on would be pointless--or do you think that the average group dissolves before getting much further? Little bit of both. In 3E, a lot of DMs were afraid of running high level s...

I believe that the number of campaigns that hit the level cap but stumbled along like a zombie even though they wanted to feel the sweet, sweet drug of power accumulation is much smaller than the number of campaigns where the DM and group had plans and fantasies of going from peasant to demigod but...

People were ready for a 3e reboot. People had grudgingly come to accept that Fighters were underpowered and Clerics were overpowered and were willing to accept major changes to get that fixed. People were frustrated by the way items worked in 3e and were willing to accept radical changes to get tha...

I don't see the current level cap as a huge issue. You actually should have levels that most people don't reach, because then DMs have more leeway as far as planning a campaign. It would really suck to have a campaign with more story, but the PCs are at max level and can't advance anymore. Also, not...

The question in my head is, did the team intentionally set out to make casters that much more powerful or where they just careless. Because either explanation works. I'd say careless. 3E is actually well balanced within the narrow level range where they playtested and starts to break down as you ge...

NWN tried that. The module toolkit was great, but I don't think anyone in the entire world used it for a once-a-week campaign. There is no way in fuck that anyone could generate a evening worth of content every week in their spare time. It took me at least 10 hours of work to generate one hour of p...

Spells-making in previous installments honestly wasn't that fantastic though. It was basically just customizing how much magicka you spend in comparison with damage/healing. Custom spells created by mods were far more interesting, and I'd be much more interested in modpacks or DLCs that give you sp...

Dude, those dice rock. It's D&D: jigsaw edition!

Another source of problems is the nature of divinity in D&D. In the real world, religion relies upon faith as a primary motivator for behavior. In D&D, the gods not only have physical forms but can converse with worshipers via Commune and Contact Other Plane spells. These are both 5th-level...

I didn't mind the secret escape route at the end of each dungeon, I guess it would have been easier if they just allowed you to fast travel out of cleared dungeons, but whatever. The linearity isn't a huge deal for me. While I would like to see more passageways, I don't want them getting too complic...

In fact, good and evil is depicted by Keith as positive and negative energy and NOT a moral force, though lots of people PROPAGANDIZE it as such (since the religions that use it are the majority and all that). Undead aren't "evil," they're just animated by negative energy. Characters can ...