The Gaming Den

I'm fond of the "ammo roll." Roll above your ammo target and you still have ammo, roll below and you've run out. In Necromunda, you only have to roll if you get certain to-hit rolls. In Champions, you have to roll every attack. Either one is fine, and a lot less onerous than counting bull...

I dunno. As messages get longer, the amount of info you can get from the length of the message is vanishingly small compared to the info from the time of the message ... Sure. Diminishing returns is totally a thing, and in decryption, the curve is probably bad enough to the point where anything pas...

bunch of words Yes. Exactly. I'm aware that the fact that you have an n-byte long message is all you have to go on. However, for the specific instances in which OTPs are useful - as outlined by Frank, above - there would also possibly be contextual information that could be combined with the inform...

John Magnum wrote:GnomeWorks, please, you really don't know what one-time pads are. Read about them or stop posting about them or both.

Everything I'm saying is apparently sailing right over your head.

You seem to be a bit unclear on how good OTPs are. What part of my analogy of the actual message being a needle in a haystack in a field of haystacks indicates that I do not understand how good they are? There is, beneath the encryption, an actual message. I understand that - at the moment, with ou...

That's why it's so important for the game to be up front with what the limitations are in the game. Because players are obviously extremely interested and they will want to use them. If you don't have rules for it, you're just forcing the MC to make some untested ones up on the fly. And since we're...

This may shock you, but the secret goal of 5E is to make money for its parent company, Hasbro. All the more reason to give them flak for failing to uphold their project's goals, then. Because in doing so, they have failed to deliver for the bottom line, and Hasbro's accountants seem like harsh mast...

The number of equipment options should be proportional to the number of dials and switches that can be fiddled with. Every piece of equipment should be distinct in some fashion. If two things do exactly the same thing and interact with all other mechanics in exactly the same way, they are redundant ...

That's why this sort of thing has to be all about the guy doing it. The hacker's range and the hacker's hack strength, with everything in range being subverted if it is below the security threshold of the hack. You can't do an action resolution per device because there are several orders of magnitu...

While the game looks like shit, it at least seems like their marketing people figured out how to pull their heads out of their asses. How so? What do you mean? Do you not recall the shit they pulled at the 4e announcement at GenCon in... what, '07? They pissed a lot of people off with that crap.

What the hell is a Legendary Action and why do they seem so completely mundane? I think it's just some set of things they tacked on to creatures that are supposed to be more awesome to let them do cool things but not terribly often. Sort of like action points from 4e, or monster powers with that di...

I don't mind the need for a group to have a healer.

I do mind that in D&D, it always (with 4e as an exception) has to have religious flavor.

Give me warlords or arcane casters with access to healing. There should be more variety in class choice for healers than "religion guy."

Right now, 5e looks like 4e did at this stage, but without anybody telling me that I am going to switch to 5e because it is the future and everyone is going to. While the game looks like shit, it at least seems like their marketing people figured out how to pull their heads out of their asses. That...

Looks like the DMG has been delayed.

Dean wrote:If a council of CR 20 Pit Fiends declared war on my party I would openly mock them but if a pack of CR 2 Devourers was coming after my party we would live in NPC murdering fear forever after.

Which is really quite stupid, because it most definitely should be the other way around.

The problem with the pit fiend, I think, is that a necro with N skeletons can kill it on his own, with N being a finite, relatively small ( maybe triple-digit, but sounds like somewhere in the double-digits) number, that he can maintain with relatively minimal effort (a few spell slots). We're talki...

Probably not. It's such a big sack of hp that it would definitely manage to kill the Necro before it was at any real risk of death. It's single target DPS is actually fairly high so I will say it is out of the range of a single 6th level character to handle. However its abilities are so meager and ...

I don't even know how to respond to that. AC 19 for a CR 20 creature? Doesn't that mean that that necromancer build that has like a dozen skeleton archers at like fifth level could kill this thing, pretty much without breaking a sweat? (Forgive me if my exact numbers are off, haven't been paying a w...

If you needed a 9 on the first roll, you needed a 9 on the second. There was no reason to look up attack bonuses again unless a person had a mental illness that affected memory. Short-term memory for single instance, no repetition, is... what, seven seconds, thereabouts? That's the number I've hear...

Btw, I have heard people complain about having to roll twice for criticals because for them it slows down the game and adds too much complexity. But so far no one is complaining about the game slowed down because of adv/dis. Weird. I think it's how the process plays out. 3e-style crits, you had to ...

That preliminary cover sketch looks nifty, at least.

Too bad it's being wasted on something that sounds like it will be terrible.

spent a part of the morning being stabbed by angry people with knives and figured out how tricky it was to stay alive. It's not impossible... but a character definitely shouldn't have more than 4 HP. I think I would give more credit for that explanation than the one given for the change on the weap...

So if your halfling is blinded or attacking an invisible creature, might as well start swinging with a heavy weapon that you are not prof. in. Makes no difference since disadvantage does not stack. Frankly, I'm gonna bring a great sword with every character in case I'm melee attacking with disadvan...

Oh yes. That was what those gauntlets (and belts of giant strength) were for. It was an implicit acceptance of the fact that low strength fighters suck balls, and at mid/high levels they need bigger numbers to work. It made DMs feel better because at least they weren't artifact swords. And at this ...

I've heard stories of other people's games where that wasn't the case, but most of the time that seems like urban legend more than anything else. The endless procession of character deaths that people describe would have frustrated the fuck out of most players. I'm trying to mentally count right no...