The Gaming Den

Why? Oh, sure, there's a table in the DMG that qualifies various types of bonuses, but I've always found that table to be a bit unwieldy. I use variant types as a 'short-cut' rather than have to write "This stacks with so-and-so but not with such-and-such..." with every entry. Besides, the...

Okay, I see what you mean by Legend, although I found their rules a bit confusing. But, yes, all my classes have 2 or 3 'tracks' (sometimes a bit more). In some cases, you get each path at every level; in others, you might only get a particular path option at every other level or every 3rd level. Ea...

I don't know what Legend you are referencing, but the intent was to give a player a choice at each level, rather than just a fixed ability at, say, 5th level. For example, a monk might want to choose Diamond Body earlier than 11th level. It's hardly a game breaker. And, yes, the Character/Class Path...

Doh! Yes, Ride skill to stay in saddle. Don't know what I was thinking, unless it was about keeping the horse under control. None of the groups I've gamed with in the past ten years has ever needed the Ride skill, so I'd pretty much forgotten what you could do with it. Buying a +10 enhancer was neve...

The metagaming is another gray area. It's a little more objective in a modern (realist) setting, such as spies and such because knowledge is fairly accessible. This sort of thing always reminds me of the TV show The Fall Guy where nephew Howie kept doing new things and explaining it by saying he spe...

So these polar opposites, where either players tell you when their characters take a piss, or they don't say anything at all and are replaced by robots? That's bullshit. There's a middle ground, and that's where you should be if you are infact sane at all. EVERYTHING is a meaningful choice tot he s...

GatFromKI-- I disagree that traps are lame, but as this post has pointed out, the mechanics for dealing with them can be. The specific game rules don't make everyone happy, and perhaps that's an impossibility. In the end, it boils down to what rule you want to use. As Gary Gygax once stated, these a...

The biggest problem is understanding that the line between player and character is always a big blur. Some players can immerse themselves into the character a lot more deeply than others. Neither way is wrong, just different. The routine of not stating that your character takes off his armor to slee...

I'm obviously getting into the community tomes rather late, but I recently went through re-vamping all the 3.5 core classes, plus adding a few more. What prompted this was threefold. The first was that I kind of liked some of the things that Pathfinder did. The second was liking some ideas that Mont...

Apparently your problem is that you think the PCs always searching for traps is a problem. It is. Because it defeats the whole purpose. When you're always searching you either find the trap or you don't, with no input from the player. That's boring and not much of a game. The most interesting decis...

Our characters had been captured by sahuagin, and we were supposed to do things to impress them. Then they poisoned us and told us to make an antidote. None of us had any of the relevant skills. So the DM tells us what ingredients we have to work with, then starts threatening us with death if we do...

Hello, everyone. Just found this site from a friend's dogpile search for info on the vampiric touch spell/ability... I've been reading entertaining, informative and amusing topics here all day but this one about searches is the one that got me interested enough to sign on. I actually agree with most...