The Gaming Den

Comparing something you do in a basement with a few friends to something intended for public consumption and possibly education is the height of narcissism. You can call anything and everything art, if you use some buzzwords and blather to some idiot critic about the supposed meaning behind it. Go ...

We do use crits. Fumbles are usually just an auto-miss, with some added flavor, which occasionally, depending on the situation, creates some minor or major havoc - if say a barbarian rolls a 1 it's usually just a miss. If he is wiedling a keen two-handed sword, and if he's fighting an enemy who has ...

In my campaign, PCs can and do affect the campaign world, and those changes carry over in the next campaign. A town liberated here, a portal discovered there, causing a new trade route to be formed, causing for renewed expansion of an old empire, up to the recent coup in the City of Brass in our cur...

I don't mind the idea of a "personally customized character" to some extent, but I vehemately object to insisting on a game that makes it so that nothing is fixed, nothing is defined, nothing is limited, and nothing other than your personal customization has any meaning - because it means...

With multiclassing rules, classes can serve as nice mechanical building blocks to get the character you want.

Of course, I consider the ability to play a personally customized character a condition to play a game. That's why I like Shadowrun, among other things, and house rules.

Seen from far enough away, those "classes" are basically the same thing (people who hit and shoot things and other people with sharp, blunt, or pointy things), and the differences between them are less important than the differences between those classes and the caster classes. Now, the di...

Having default fluff being "not always applicable" to all people with that class is exactly what I want. Much more fun.

Since I started doing render pictures, my interest in PHB art lessened somewhat, since I can use my own pictures as illustrations for my PCs and NPCs. And I often change the fluff of a game until it suits me better.

So, I am bound more to look at the mechanics of a class, not the art or fluff.

I can imagine a character that uses axes - especially throwing axes, or dual-wielded axes similar to tomahawks - as a swashbuckler. Quite easily.

Being a knight includes things that you'll love about it and things that you may not think are the greatest...if the classes/options/whatever are halfway well designed everything is like that. Nothing should be "customize your PC so that he has exactly the abilities you want and you are reward...

The old "If you're a superb player, your fighter/rogue will do great - as long as you're playing with wizards/clerics whose players are stupid" excuse.

Even so, batman works in my opinion when confined to Gotham city, dealing with criminals in his league - mostly normal humans too.

I don't like teleport at all, so banning it solved the teleport/scry problem. Long-range fast travel is done by using portals.

Ayup. Improved Invisibility was among the spells that went away. Between cutting down spellcasting some, and using ToB, the specific campaign is pretty balanced for the specific characters - which do not have teleport.

Accidentally, our 3.0 game works a bit like a mix of Frank's points thanks to a lot of house rules: - Teleport is restricted to special prestige classes (who basically give up 3+ spell caster levels just for the ability to teleport). - "general magic items" are scarce, and stat- and ac-boo...

Elennsar wrote: That doesn't make "orcs as a race" dumb. That makes "all orcs the DM creates" dumb.

Which is fine...if you don't mind having orc PCs ignore this for any reason whatsoever.

Which, as has been made clear, is what we do not mind. What we actively advocate, actually.

[quote="Elennsar]Stop assuming that because I'm against the "anything you can think of" that I'm against "anything that I don't personally like". Its untrue and unfounded. [/Quote] We are talking game design and development, we do not have set limits for PCs, so if you are a...

Why should it simulate "anything you can imagine"? Why should you be able to play an Elven Jedi Kakita School Iaijutsu Master? Because it's fun (Or I assume someone who wanted to play one would find it fun, at least). It's a game. The point of a game is to have fun. If it makes the game m...

Elennsar wrote:As for Enlarge: No, but nor is it something that can stick forever, either.

A misworded wish, some artefact, a - gasp! - houserule, wild magic, etc. There are multiple ways to have Enlarge stick forever.

Rarity is of no consequence when it comes to PC building. That you cannot understand that is one of your main problems. Why? So that PCs can have whatever ludicrious combination of traits the player wants even if it is barely believable that any of them would happen? If this is barely believable, t...

You can have a 7 foot 6 inches dwarf or halfing. Spell gone awry, freak accident of genetics, godly intervention. All work out.

Of course, you don't allow that, because they were not dwarves or halflings anymore. "Enlarge" is a race-change spell in your game.

It is rather easy to be more special in that regard than average. A 14 (for either a human or an orc or a LT) is not hard. If you want to be special in the sense Hawking is special, you're running into something considerably rarer. Rarity is of no consequence when it comes to PC building. That you ...

Note: I am not against someone being special in both being "unusually open minded" and "unusually strong". You do argue against that though. For pages upon pages. I'm just noting that PCs "are special" does not mean "PCs are both unusually open minded AND unusuall...

Ah, we're back to "If the orc PC is not conforming to my stereotype, it's not an orc anymore".

There's a couple points there. #1: I'm fine with "Personal background: Something that compensates for my penalty in exchange for something else." So, an orc wizard without intelligence penality is fine, since he still suffers from the prejudices of both orcs and humans (and elves etc.) th...

Now, if you had something like "orc nerd: You gain +2 to Intelligence (meaning you suffer no racial penalty to Intelligence). However, you suffer () to balance this out and also have to deal with how orcs think smart people are suspiciously elf like, which may cause 'interesting times'." ...