The Gaming Den

Whatever. I see your point that a "half-dragon, half-construct gnome vampire" is a bloated concept, but I don't see your point as to what that has to do with the RP. At the end of the day, you pick your setting and your major races and anyone from a minor race plays "stranger from a ...

Making only five races and many cultures has just as much or as little bigotry as many races and many cultures. It just means that in the few races system, people say things like "All Westerners are evil" rather than saying "all orcs are evil." Xenophobia affects cultures just a...

Whatever. I see your point that a "half-dragon, half-construct gnome vampire" is a bloated concept, but I don't see your point as to what that has to do with the RP. At the end of the day, you pick your setting and your major races and anyone from a minor race plays "stranger from a ...

Making only five races and many cultures has just as much or as little bigotry as many races and many cultures. It just means that in the few races system, people say things like "All Westerners are evil" rather than saying "all orcs are evil." Xenophobia affects cultures just a...

Playing "stranger in a strange land" is as much of an RPG hook as any other, except you also get to do racial RPG when people from your race follow you to where you are("on no, ninjas/my tribe/guildmen have tracked me down to repay an old debt/avenge someone/bring me back by force!)....

Look, the system has to be able to have whatever setting put into it. Some people want kitchen-sink settings with seven superfluous flavors of elf, and while that may or may not be lame, I think it's madness to try to stop them. That's what they want to do, let them. So what are we actually talking...

I mean those character concepts are pretty damned simple and many long-running TV series have had combos like "child savant, android, bestial alien, and psychic who are all military officers." How about "gang leader lawyer, god-thing, wizard, vampire, and bardic demon?" How abou...

If 3e taught us anything, it taught us that letting people make their own settings and monsters or just adding to yours will let you win at the RPG industry. I'm not looking for personal fame here, so I don't mind if someone tacks on their awesome setting to mine. If 3E taught us anything, it's tha...

Earth has one playable race, humans, the rest are just variants. Maybe two in a sci-fi setting, if you buy that Dolphins are intelligent and computers can become AI.

I think it's time that we learnt that D&D is now and always has been a weak setting and that the problems associated with Gygaxian tomfoolery and Andy Collins rules halfassedry is in fact directly descendant from that fact. D&D has shitty rules interactions and continuously unsatisfactory w...

I think what I'm getting at is this is laregly a minor matter of semantics. Something like .0015% of all the gamers of the world are going to care whether Goblins and Dwarves can have children. The other 99.985% aren't going to care whether the Goblins in the Monster Manual are genetically distinct ...

Most laws don't have CRIMINAL penalties. http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSN1249958320080812 "But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime. In this instance, the two joint reports found only violations of the civil service laws." It is interesting that...

DnD does all, and I think it is one of the many reasons for it's success. I mean, even though everyone knows the baseline racial traits of the drow, the abilities of one House and other may dramatically differ because they are assumed to be different cultures in a greater culture. If one of your ra...

Seems cool. On the face of it, the Alfar are going to be a huge grab-bag of tricks and abilities compared to the other races.

I think we're saying the same thing. If I read him right, RC's getting at something slightly different, which is that spells have different areas of effect. 4E has Burst 1, Burst 2, all the way on up. If you just define an AoE as "Area," you lose that. That might not be a big deal, but IMO...

Discussion of Good Ideas from 4E

Found the link from one of PR's sad little threads. For your reading pleasure. Some interesting comments, some downright odd ones.

The main problem with not having a battlemap is handling area effects. It doesn't really have to be squares exactly, It can be arbitrary "zones", where any area effect hits everyone in that zone, but I think we probably do need some kind of map system. That depends on what sorts of area e...

The only media where a visual representation is less preferable seems to be IM though. Uh, that's the main media we're talking about. Ice, can you give it a rest for a bit? This discussion isn't going anywhere. For one thing, we're arguing over a hypothetical system that might, hypothetically, work...

That's a nice way to break out the powers and avoid tradeoffs like "I can summon a Solar"/"I can move an extra square per action."

CPsi is fifteen abortions crammed into one book. All the feats and PrCs and classes manage to fail spectacularly. On a side note, threads about common fantasy tropes that 4e shat on always have potential . As an aside, if the developers delayed 4th edition so that the first 3 books could have all t...

All MMO and RTS games where I know the details of the stealth mechanics, stealth is dependent only on distance, abilities, and level (plus being in a position to see the target if they weren't being stealthy). They blend together for me. WoW most notoriously, LotRO IIRC. Usually, the engine factors...

Titanium Dragon is just knee jerking and it's not pretty. Oh no what if they fly over the jungle? What if they decide to torch the jungle? Maybe they are trying to tell you...screw your jungle. If TD can't adapt to players skip over a place then overland flight is not the problem. It's almost like ...

I'm not sure what that language really means w/o a map. Let me put it another way. With some things, abstractions are going to work out OK. For instance, bunching up versus spacing out can be handled for a group of monsters by giving them the status "Close Combat," "Skirmish," or...

However, to do this means changing the DM from someone who merely moves pieces on a board to instead the arbiter of the board itself. Which, if you've ever played in a non-visual medium is more like what the DM did originally. Do you think "Mapless" has to mean "DM is arbiter?" ...

3) No emergent tactics: With abstract positioning, things like shield+spear walls, blocking escape routes, finding a position you can move in and out of cover, sneaking around the warriors to attack the back line, flanking manuevers, and so forth can't just arise naturally from the positions people...