The Gaming Den

So if feats shouldn't grant numeric bonuses (because that leads to feat taxes and increased divergence on the RNG between specialists and non-specialists, both of which are bad) and shouldn't grant new tactical options/fighting styles (because... GIANT FROG, I guess?) what should they be for?

So yeah, wolves shouldn't have feats. They shouldn't have "backgrounds" or "perks" or whatever the fuck your system uses either. They should be composed of much less lego bits than a player character because they are made out of the system that makes a fucking one-shot wolf rath...

Some good stuff, some not so good 4 and 5 are very good points, but 4 directly contradicts 2 and to a lesser extent 3. 3 is a good notion up to a point, but I think you're going too far with it. Shriekers, Ropers and other immobile gribblies would be better statted as traps, but an intelligent spel...

This is a minor nitpick, but should Ogres really be CR 2? Brown bears are CR 4 (admittedly, by the looks of them they have far too many HP, so maybe they should be re-statted down to 3) but I really think an ogre should be better than that, since it's basically bear + brutal cunning/cunning brutalit...

D&D3e classed them by race, with the problems of succubi temptresses and tentacled horrors being the smae class D&D4e classed them by role, which makes more sense in theory, but the execution... Is there a way to make it work though? Brutes and Skirmishers seem distinct enough, one walks up...

I stand corrected.

You always round down in 3.5. Every time. So 1d6+(1/2) = 1d6+0. The only thing that's even sort of an exception is if 1 damage is somehow divided, then there's still a minimum of 1 damage dealt, but that's really just because another rule sticks its fingers in the pie (the rule of minimum damage). Y...

That is some seriously piddly, fiddly stuff there.

Typical Paizo fare really. Why, why do they love +1 bonuses so much?!

Wheel of Time seemed like a fantasy setting and it didn't have that many monsters, did it? Trollocs, Myraddral, those flying things, ogres, wolves, and various human types? Well, there were a few more obscure types of Shadowspawn (Grey Men, Gholam, Jumara), and the Seanchan exotics, but good point....

You guys aren't reading Shadzar in good faith. He's saying that the Thief class in AD&D is self-justifying and that as long as it exists and has "Move Silently: 15%" as one of its class features, other people cannot be allowed to successfully sneak at all, probably excepting circumstan...

"However, the Omega Sanction does not actually kill its target, but sends its consciousness back in time . Although the presence of Batman's corpse would suggest that he is dead, at the conclusion of Final Crisis it is revealed that Batman has been sent to the distant past, and it is later rev...

Picking on Silver Age comics is unsporting. :mrgreen: And I would like to point out that the very next panel after the ones Ogre posted is this one: http://i.imgur.com/tLHpA.jpg That Batman can pull the trigger before the beam hits him, I can buy. And that the bullet is depicted as hitting Darkseid ...

It's "Wizard AC". The main reason it doesn't work is that because the AC of most creatures is completely arbitrary, very few creatures have meaningful touch ACs at higher levels.

Fixing that somehow would pretty much solve the problem, I think.

It happened in the Justice League Unlimited animated series. The series finale, if I remember correctly. And yes, it was pretty iffy. They were clearly going for "Batman avoids the beam until he can maneuver a Parademon to intercept it", but the animation completely fails to sell that, so ...

As I read it, the gnomes were polluting the water with runoff from their mine... so the PCs were basically acting in defense of the environment, ha!

Because D&D is a level-based system, which precludes more discrete advancement, and as mentioned, I want to relate advancement to in-character actions, with a possiblity of missing out. So I don't want to hand out levels by DM fiat. I could hand out "exp" in level-sized chunks only, wh...

Sure. But even the Tome Fighter has the problem that it has hardly any abilities that exist outside the framework of the mechanics. A Sorcerer can throw Fireballs, a Bard can sing supernaturally inspiring songs, and a Rogue can find a weak spot on anything that breathes and some things that don't. T...

If you were going to do this, I would at the very least use some kind of variant cleric with a limited amount of Spells Known, to allow characters to actually be distinct.

If everyone has 90% of their abilities in common, only a night's rest away, that's far too samey.

Well, obviously. Fortunately, a level is always 1000 exp x current level, and equal CR monster exp is already 300 exp x current level, so there's no reason not to make any other rewards follow the same paradigm of meaningful reward N = N exp x current level.

This is a lot of complication for very little gain, if any at all. And I don't see why designers ought to cater to narrow-minded, wrong people. Foil Action is not broken as an ability of a 9th+ level PC. It just isn't. (I don't like playing in the paradigm it's designed under, but that's a different...

In early D&D, experience rewards mainly came from retrieving treasure, and experience rewards for fighting monsters were a pittance, to encourage goal-oriented play and avoidance of unnecessary fights. That's all well and good, but getting filthy rich isn't a goal that makes sense for all types ...

Well, the variance increases the more dice are in the pool. That's how a dicepool system works. I realize this part, and I also know that keeping the dice pool size small or static will therefore help (obviously), but restricting the dice pool size kind of takes away the best feature of the mechani...

So is the beta still ongoing?
The mentions in IMHO made me really curious to try this game.

Is there any way to create a Shadowrun-style, "counting successes" dicepool system that doesn't have a huge variance relative to the size of the dicepools?

It's definitely intuitive , but it has two problems: 1. damage dice usually aren't where the serious damage is coming from in D&D, so this would have to be part of a significant system overhaul to be meaningful. Even 1d10 -> 1d4 is just 3 less damage per hit on average. 2. More importantly, it w...