The Gaming Den

Mine had something like twenty small booths and one scanner. The main advantage of the fill-in-the-bubble technology is that the SATs and PSATs are checked by it and every school in the country uses it, so it has been established to work and the companies that can actually deliver have been identifi...

When I said "a more sophisticated tree," I was talking about mechanically, not conceptually. Also, when I said "tigers, hawks and wolves can all be..." I meant that they are all able to take that path, not that all had to take that path. What I want to do is separate the upper-le...

I voted at around ten, which may have made voting easier. Virginia has just gone over to scantron ballots, which means that they can have as many as twenty people filling out ballots at once. There was no line at all. My polling place had exactly one machine, but it was an optical scan drop-box, so ...

Like knights, at a certain point an animal's schtick diverges. Can you really say that Great Cat actually has an iconic level 20 character? The advantage of having separate classes is that it allows for a more sophisticated tree. Lions, Eagles, and dogs are all equally deserving of having Messiah as...

Of course, Aslan is actually a multiclass Great Cat/Messiah, which makes all these arguments moot. Similarly, Fenris is a Wolf with some kind of Demigod template class. Really, most of the high-level animals have some kind of template or prestige class to make them hero- and god-level threats. What ...

this is about the second least forum I've ever posted on. Although WotC tends to offend me on a different level than mere swear words can do. I wasn't talking about swearing, although this is the only one where avoiding the swear filter was a tradition espoused by the entire board only because it c...

This is by far the most offensive board I post on. If the quality of the logical arguments or the amount of thought put into them was any lower, I probably wouldn't be here.

And in this case, "big" means "at least 4-6 times as many abilities as the maximum you'll ever learn." We need to go higher than that, if every class is supposed to cover 4 roles. A character that sticks to a single role needs to have some choice in his abilities, so you need at...

Oh, and, in talks about a new game, I'd always favor no ressurrection at all, ever. Resurrection of various forms is a classic mythological element. Restricting resurrections blocks Hercules, Gilgamesh, Orpheus, and many other stories. This is really a decision that we shouldn't get to make, except...

Crissa wrote:So unlike 4e, you have a choice which wins fast, a choice that wins slow, and a choice that fails. But everyone has something on that scale.

Do you mean everyone has an option for all three of these, or only that noone has options too far off the scale?

The basic concept of the skill challenge - everyone contributes to group success, different characters use different skills, make it a genuine minigame - is sound. The problem is implementing it in a reasonable fashion with enough complexity to be interesting but that does not take too long too play...

I'm reasonably certain that for CR purposes, versatility won't noticeably raise a monster's difficulty. This depends on the monster. Some are expected to be the focus of an adventure and be prepared for, and these are going to gain power because the PCs' preparations are useless. For example, if a ...

2nd edition paladins were also required to have really good ability scores, so the average paladin starts off better than the average fighter/cleric or generic Priest.

But then you need to spend at the cross-class rate, which absolutely blows

Also, people here are often jerks, and that amuses me much more than the rampant offense and umbrage people take in most other places This is quite true, but it works much better in the Dungeonomicon and such than in a reply to a particular person, or even just a post where everything else is argui...

They have so far not only missed out on licensing fees for Dragon/Dungeon , but also spent time & money on producing more website content that is currently free, made their forums inconvenient without tying them into the main site, and set up the DI, which has yet to become a for-pay service. D&...

I can really get into the idea of Rangers being ranged controllers with built in followers. That gives them a clearly defined semi-unique roll with neat self-synergy that you can really build on. The problem with this is that Robin Hood and Aragorn are not ranged controllers. As cool an idea as it ...

A ranger fights b/c they're forced to. And that's a really hard precept to keep in a character. This seems to be mostly a large-scale issue. Robin Hood fights because he feels he must, but this doesn't mean he has to avoid combat with people he knows are his enemies. In combat, this shouldn't make ...

I think that the range of things labeled as "rangers" is really too big for any one class to contain. No one class should be able to represent Robin Hood, Aragorn, and Batman. They are really just too different unless the "class" is made entirely of selectable abilities. We do ne...

If elves are 7ft tall and live in the desert (I'm guessing darksun on this), why bows? Where are they getting the wood in the desert? I think that elves = jungle makes more sense than desert. Hot environment, lots of wood, jungle discourages heavy armor, etc. While Dark Sun is awesome, if I was bas...

6.) Big race. Not necessarily giants or ogres, but Shaq or NFL sized. These aren't put in every setting, but it can be done if played well. 7.) Two or three rubber forehead aliens. Physical bonuses and penalties, and different sensory bonuses. These might just be to satisfy everybody's fear of chang...

D&D Cultures Make No Sense Most of the cultural baggage in D&D as far as the core races are concerned comes from Tolkien's adaptations of the Norse mythology. We have assigned a monoculture and weapon stereotype based on a series of books about one particular adventure in the first world to...

The key weakness of Asymmetric Code is that by its very nature anyone who really wants to can have both plain text and encrypted text of their choice. Simply take plain text of your choice and encrypt it with the public version and you can do “math” to decrypt it out and have what is essentially th...

Of course, CAN is essentially this system's damage, so if we start penalizing CAN like that, we need to make sure the battle's still going to end... but... CAN (Combat Advantage Number) goes up if: * You are higher level than your target. * You have positional advantage over a target. * Your target...

When you say 2d10, do you mean 1d10 + 1d10 or do you mean 1d100? I think multi-die resolution mechanics would work better, maybe some sort of TNE like system. GrimDark strikes me as a setting where nobody ever gets quite off the RNG for attacks, but they get way off for actually doing damage. It's n...