The Gaming Den

FrankTrollman wrote:I met the Hickmans back in 2003. Laura Hickman makes Gully Dwarf jokes in public without prompting. It's super embarrassing and more than a little bit offensive.

What's wrong with gully dwarf jokes? You're talking like they're an actual race in the real world.

If you want to argue that Ogres are badly designed because they are hard to scale up and the encounter guidelines need to be scaled up because other than the blood opera that is Hobgoblin encounters all the sample encounters are trivial speed bumps - that's something I can respect. But I can't resp...

But unsurprisingly, again, your math is bad (and trying to frame it as a fighter vs ogre fight is ridiculous on the basic principles of the game). The ogre is 59 hp and AC 11. If the party takes more than 2 rounds killing that, they're doing it wrong. Everybody is inherently hitting on 6s, a greats...

The Sorcerer casting progression is kind of handy for "spellcasting monsters" though. They don't quite have the same complexity or power as if they'd had Wizard casting, and it gets to be based off Charisma, which is the "Monster power" ability score (exception: Con is used for ...

As to the other suggestion I made, I specifically pointed out that stat ≠ attribute. I'm talking about things like BAB, where picking up a new weapon is easy, but to use it well you need the BAB. Once you've bought up your lightning bolt to level appropriate, just buying the first rank of...

Now, I fully expect that everyone here but Cyberzombie will be able to go through the Players Handbook and seriously be able to determine the ultimate fate of the game (and the PDF is a prelude of things to come with bad math, One True Class/Race combos, and a level of disinterest that can only be ...

This is a joke, right? An actual parody of stupid arguments? No? Holy crap you're an idiot. Ah, the typical gaming den opening insult. I can only suspect that because you felt the need to open with an insult, that it's to detract from the weakness of your actual argument. But just as there are powe...

This isn't a swords vs spells issue. This is a one shot issue. If PCs have it, monsters need it too. And if you take it away from PCs, you get 4E. We've already been down that road. It sucked. We don't want to go down that road again (at least I don't). If you played anything other than 4E, you've ...

Well, unsurprisingly, you're wrong. Hobgoblins have always been mooks, slightly stronger than goblins, but effectively a tidier orc. And dangerous is not the same as 'threaten TPK'. I don't think it's particularly possible to be "wrong" when it comes to how powerful you think level 1 PCs ...

Shadowrun isn't the complete failure you make it out to be though. The pitch, aesthetic and setting conceits are demonstrably capable of resonating with people for quite some time and that can and should be considered when deciding if a game is a net contributor to the hobby. Some people want more ...

If 2 of 4 attacks come up 15+ (or 12+ on rogues/wizards), thats half the party down. Granted there is a lot the party can do to drop multiple hobgoblins in round 1 as well, But I'd say about every fifth hobgoblin fight run at first level has the potential to turn into a complete fucking disaster. M...

While the fighter's protection style is neat, the hobgoblins will be more than happy to stay back and pelt with bows, and it requires the use of a shield. I don't want to say it's a trap option... but it looks like a trap option. Out of the fighting styles, it's pretty clearly the weakest being ver...

4 Hobgoblins will rip a 1st level party in half. Their two dice of bonus flanking damage is intense. I wouldn't say they'd rip them in half. It'd be a close fight where people are likely to die, but it wouldn't be an auto-win for the hobgoblins. I'm really not even sure if the hobs are even favored...

In my opinion Good RPGs do the following: 1. Keeps the players excited: Combats should not be slow, boring and grindy. Your die rolls should be swingy enough such that people care about the outcome and get excited or nervous about the numbers that show on their d20s (or d6s). 2. Doesn't coddle the p...

They will benefit themselves regardless of the suffering this causes - that's D&D Evil. Whether it's real-world 'evil' is left as an exercise for the student. This. What the Borg do isn't for some altruistic cause. It's to benefit themselves and themselves only. They want to assimilate new tech...

The Borg aren't evil, they're amoral. Big difference. They're evil. If you're sentient and selfishly trample over everyone's freedom and lives in your path, you're evil (at least in D&D terms). Not caring about good/evil doesn't make you amoral, that just makes you evil. You're only amoral if y...

And where I have no choice but to compare to previous games, the treatment that the Forgotten Realms and Darksun got was just weirdly out of touch with their customer base. 3e FR won awards. 4e FR has been officially removed from the canon. Oh really? They outright ignored the 4E Forgotten Realms c...

Yeah, I have to agree with PL. Like avoiding synergy, avoiding redundancy is basically impossible unless you want a super simple RPG. The only thing you can do is try for situational balance where you design monsters such that you want a good range of abilities to combat them to get the ideal attack...

Krusk wrote:The rules are very clear.

If the rules were "very clear", this thread wouldn't be on page 7 with plenty of participants on both sides.

Now, this is a 5e hype post, but blame shifting aside, this is Mike Mearls saying 'Yep. 4e = MMO, bitches.' Ah, so that's where that comes from. Well that explains a lot, since I didn't think 4E had the MMO feel at all. It came off as a poorly designed miniatures game ripoff of Final Fantasy Tactics.

How the fuck can you claim to know designer intent. These rules were written by like 5 dudes. The only way you know designer intent is if you personally are the dude who wrote the rule, won the debate about what goes to print, AND remember how you intended it to be used 10+ years later. If you can'...

Occluded Sun wrote:The Borg were pretty awesome while they lasted (don't get me started on the Queen thing).

Yeah, more evil races like this would be good for D&D, especially for outsiders.

The biggest design problem with 4E was that it's designed as a miniatures game, not an RPG. I'm not really sure where the MMORPG stuff comes from, it's really designed as a pure miniatures game. The thing that they missed was the fact that miniatures games have a couple things that RPGs don't: trans...

There is no designer intent because there after multiple authors and editors. Any piece of text you see is a compromise between many sets of visions and opinions. If an author tells you they had an intent different from what is actually written, it generally means that they fucking lost an argument...

Good point. It's fairly difficult to come up with something that hasn't been embraced by humans somewhere at some time. Even the more bizarre examples I could produce would probably line up with some sort of mental illness. I think it's generally okay to have races embody various mental disorders a...