The Gaming Den

You could always operate under the assumption that the gods aren't actually omnipotent and are bound by some form of celestial law, thus cannot overtly affect events on the PMP. Perhaps they are barred from leaving their personal demense, and are forced to act through agents such as angels, devils, ...

unless the time based is going to be "real time" then time based is a bad idea. This will probably sound "excessively gamis" but where the game is going to act like a game everything needs to built around an idea of what is "normal" for the game. I tend to agree about ...

Seems to me that the best answer is to de-couple the Gods from the idea of actual morality. Take a page from real world myths, wherein the gods are conniving, self-centered assholes that people swear fealty to for the mere reason that they are cosmically powerful entities that can fuck people's shit...

Pretty much this. The existence of Healing Word makes out-of-combat healing into an annoying and time consuming ordeal where everyone looks at the Cleric and makes him fiddle with things. It's the opposite of fixing the problem where people draw straws to see who has to be the Cleric. -Username17 W...

Weird, my party rollled all the time for healing during 5 minute rests. The cleric's healing word was vastly superior to straight burning off healing surges. So, the party would wait 5 minutes, go through a few healing words (roll a handful of dice), then wait 5 more minutes to repeat the process. ...

I've read the last couple articles, and they're interesting in that the seem to be heading in a direction that I like (Basic D&D, with modern unified mechanical structure and hopefully lessons learned from 4E's shortcomings). I'm not actually a huge fan of having 80,000 little customizable widge...

3rd edition is really simple fro tripping. It's basically opposed str checks with size modifiers. That's both pretty simple, and relatively intuitive. It takes NO actual resources to maintain a roughly 50/50 chance to trip things that aren't much larger than you, or have a strength or dex score tha...

Psychic Robot wrote:

Soooo...this is supposed to be an echo chamber of non-dissenting opinions?

you must be unfamiliar with how nerds work

I do know how they work...they never pass up a good argument. Especially about esoteric, trivial bullshit.

Well, in theroy yes, but just about nobody around here likes 4e, so there's that. People here don't really like ANY game, I've noticed. Or at least they're hyper-critical of pretty much all games. This isn't a bad thing, mind. The discussions on this board are focused on design theory and mechanics...

Indeed, we're looking at the one part of 4e that worked in some sense, "the fighter can defend better than before". This is the wrong thread for that, unless there's something in the previous page that says the 4e fighter is uniformly worse than the 3e fighter. Isn't there a thread of &qu...

No, that's a +20% chance for you to hit them and a -20% for them to hit you. Those are two separate percentages. They cannot be added together to make the numbers seem more impressive. And that's beside the point that bullshit bonuses are, in fact, bullshit, and them being so important in 4E is a m...

How is your tide of iron example any different from the 3.5 fighter tripping the monster, causing him to not be able to move to the ranger or forcing him to stand up and getting smacked in the face? Tide of Iron does damage to the monster, without provoking an attack of opportunity and doesn't requ...

I've been pondering the idea of getting rid of damage dice altogether for this. I know that many gamers get a visceral thrill from rolling a large handful of damage dice against an enemy, myself included, one of my goals here is to keep the tactical nature of 4E while speeding up combat significantl...

For tools there really is no reason to have 5 tiers. There really only needs to be three: Poor: Breaks on unmodified 1 Good: never breaks on failed roll Masterwork:+2 static bonus It's simple and easy to memorize. Yeah...you're right. That's the beginning of my attempt to pare down the equipment li...

PROPRIETY! These are the rules for having stuff. WEAPONS Melee Weapon Damage Accuracy Property Cost Encumberance Light Blade (Poor) 1d4 +3 Graceful 1 Coin 1 Light Blade (Good) 1d6 +3 Graceful 2 Coins 1 Light Blade (Masterwork) 1d8 +3 Graceful 20 Coin 1 Medium Blade (Poor) 1d6 +2 Graceful 2 Coin 2 M...

SPECIAL FX! These are the rules for being super. HEROISM Heroism measures a character's ability to defy fate and mortal limitations. By spending points of heroism, PC's can accomplish a number of things: Use a Racial Power Re-roll a failed attack or check Make an immediate saving throw at the begin...

CHARACTER! These are the rules for being somebody. RACES Humans Size: Medium; Base Speed: 6; Normal Vision Industrious: Humans gain a +1 Static Bonus on all skill checks. Perseverant: Humans gain a +1 Static Bonus on all Save Rolls. Adroit: When a human character spends Heroism to boost an attack, ...

ADVENTURE! These are the rules for going places and doing things. CHALLENGE DC Trivial 5 Easy 10 Moderate 15 Challenging 20 Hard 25 Legendary 30 Nigh Impossible 35 SKILLS Skills represent a character's ability to overcome challenges that require more than mere force of arms. Skills are broken down ...

ACTION! These are the compiled rules for killin' stuff. ACTION ECONOMY During each combatants turn, they can take a Minor Action and a Major Action. Minor Actions - These are things that are fairly swift to accomplish, such as moving, switching weapons, sustaining a power, taking a combat stance, e...

CORE SYSTEM This is the first and most important rule to remember is that anything a character wishes to accomplish can be ruled by rolling 1d20 + modifiers and comparing the result to a target number. If the result meets or exceeds this number, then the attempt is a success. If the result falls be...

I have to admit, that hacking existing games is much more difficult than I had previously imagined. I am making some headway in my Microlite-ish 4E clone project. I've decided to compile my notes here so that if anything is terribly unplayable, someone will catch it before any major design decisions...

Anyway, on the subject of modifiers. I want to get away from that thing that happens where players have to add up several different modifiers from disparate sources to determine what ACTUALLY gets added to their roll. My solution is that there are three different types of modifiers: Static bonuses -...

Anyway, for making 4E work as intended, and cutting out a lot of the real problems we all hate, as well as just trimming the size down, I really like where this project is going. I'm still happy enough with 3.5+Tome that I probably wouldn't end up playing it, but you're going in a good direction it...