The Gaming Den

The proposed overhaul to the skill system doesn't even need to be that janky or involve that many new rules. Just give everyone expertise, and then the Bard and Rogue class features just give them expertise in more skills. If you don't want to stretch out the DCs, you can make Expertise into Luck (...

A first level wizard should be preparing the spells 'please DM let me play something else the first three levels and let me retroactively change my character' and/or 'please only do one encounter per long rest'. Wizards, Sorcerers, and Warlocks are boring and a chore to play until level 5 under the...

yo what first level spells should an abjuration wizard be grabbing

I went with Mage Armor+Shield+Find Familiar as the obvious base, absorb elements, and then the rest is probably gonna be rituals

No, I'm not doing some new age TTRPG design thing where I suggest we go back to magic tea party. I want a good ol' discourse on those fundamental things of systems and TTRPGs. A starting place: DMs are the Leviathan, given power to avoid the state of nature of everyone yelling over each other. Rules...

merxa wrote:I'd also probably cut levels in half, so there's only 10 levels in the game, each level would be significant and powerful, but it removes dead levels.

I'm okay with this iff there is the possibility for horizontal advancement within a level.

A 10th level Rogue is a bit less clear because at that point you've gotten your Dex up to 20 and so you actually can set an ASI on fire for some stupid flavor feat. All Rogues are gonna be somewhat decent at Stealth because it's a Dex skill. I would not call grabbing that shit-tastic BattlemasterLit...

What it means how? Alignment means precisely jack because you can reasonably justify about any behavior with any alignment. The only objective things you can determine from D&D alignment is what alignment tags affect you for things like spells, class restrictions, and what flavor other plane yo...

keeping "Alignment" makes it seem like it's somehow reflective of your character's values and goals in some deeper personal sense as opposed to "what you're doing right now" The thing is that that's not what alignment means. -Username17 That's what alignment is typically taken t...

If you rename it "Affiliation" and it reflects something like "whoever's employing you", with the understanding that it can and will change over time, i'm probably okay with that. keeping "Alignment" makes it seem like it's somehow reflective of your character's values ...

Divine Soul Sorcerers are no longer UA because they got published in XGE, but they don't have ritual casting. But who cares, Ceremony: Wedding lasts a week. The spell got changed a bit in XGE as well: Wedding. You touch adult humanoids willing to be bonded together in marriage. For the next 7 days, ...

I've got another question for 6e: How do you change the six primary attributes? Something like what Fate Accelerated did is interesting to me - instead of attributes they had "Approaches" and you could do things Sneakily or Handsomely or some shit like that. So it's not a measure of inhere...

how do you teach or explain good adventure design? I think it has to / should follow good story structure. You establish Main Conflict, which provides Character Motivation, then Rising Action (Minor Conflicts arise related to the Main Conflict), then Climax (the greatest moment of tension, suspense...

so really it's not "rules for RPing" but rather "I want more player control over non-player characters and outcomes, taking that control out of the GM's purview" or even GM-less games. but that's totally fucking different and isn't really acknowledging why the GM/Players distinct...

As cool as it is to cast Time Stop on-the-fly... why the fuck is that allowed? Because it's a thing that happens in d&d land, and the moment the GM starts saying "Oh no, casting Time Stop on the fly is only for my penis-extension NPCs" that's when we enter into 4E territory where PCs ...

ok here's something we actually can agree on - in the Book Layout thread it was noted that RPGs typically don't sit down and say "okay, here's how you make an adventure" so instead of focusing on this weird shit abt forcing players to pretend to be elves (that whole thing is just resolved ...

Some stuff for dicepool threshold analysis: function: dicepool X { result: Xd{0,0,0,0,1,1} } \ use "at least" \ loop A over {1..12}{ output [dicepool A] named "size: [A&#...

Cargo Cult D&D

guys come on... the almight and wise DM will decide what that means... its all abt the joruney Not the rules

edit: this is reminding me of when I made an adept magick up for one of our UA campaigns. I wrote up a Junkomancer whose taboo was that he couldn't throw away stuff. I think his significant power was being able to have or find something useful. Don't recall much else mechanically since it was forev...

it's kind of hard to critique UA3e on a particular basis because it's fucked from the second they decided to stick with percentile roll-under also I think Mask's point wasn't "it's okay because it's stupidly powerful", it was "it's okay because it's stupidly powerful and thus allows y...

I've finally got my hands on the release edition of Unknown Armies 3e. It is the absolute worst RPG I've ever seen. It is insuferably pretentious hipsterish bullshit. To give you a highlight: The school of magic built around guns prohibits you from using guns. Which is retarded, but then it gets wo...

hexblade is one of the most egregious class archetypes, to the point where you can get people who aren't seething rage monsters to look at it and say "wow, Mearls really DID fuck up with this thing, jesus christ" Hexblade 1/Paladin X lets you be a SAD Paladin as long as you stick to Sword+...

do you understand how your statement could be construed as "WotC obviously did not use that as a marketing statement because it's stupid" as opposed to "if they chose to use that as a marketing statement then it would be stupid", especially since the first clause of that statemen...

More concrete examples would be useful here. Diplomacy combined with "Degrees of Dispositions" make a good case for gradations. Deception with "Degrees of Confidence" (ugh, merge those two). Intimidation with... I dunno, Intimidation is a shit skill. Can this even be under the sa...

Take 15, takes 10 times as long, makes sense since there's a 97%~ chance of getting a 15 with 10 rolls. You'd probably want to have DC thresholds for time instead of trying to do a function from roll -> time spent. Something like: DC-10: Succeed, takes four times as long DC-5: Succeed, takes twice a...