The Gaming Den

Indeed, the idea of people fighting in big fusion-engine robots, generally with weapon accuracy and range so low that every fight turns into mud wrestling, is hideously stupid on its face. I don't think there IS a coherent reason to explain why big robot fighting would make any realistic sense. But,...

I've played more than my share of big robot fightin' games...one thing that separates these games from, say, D&D is wild variability in the damage. Every shot needs a chance to hit, or to miss. And every hit needs to have at least a remote chance of doing nothing, or causing a thermonuclear expl...

No, they got rid of the paradigm that healing should cost a surge or some finite resource, by introducing at-will abilities that heal without costing surges.

The N-encounters a day thing is an artifact of when DnD4.0 had a 'no healing without spending a healing surge, or at least a daily' paradigm. Of course, folks complained because this paradigm meant that healing potions actually cost a surge, so WoTC got rid of it (complaining isn't fun, after all). ...

Really? It's been my experience that while there are some hiccups to learning 4th Edition from 3rd Edition (my latest one is that I thought 4E characters can take 20 but they can't for some dumbass reason) you're probably better off learning the game from that vantage point than from, say, a jRPG. ...

4e is still d20 dnd. At its base it still works the same basic way. Whats more, you could convert a 3rd edition character over to 4th edition and your character would be about the same power level as a 4e character. 4e is really just 3e with a different top coat. If you know how to play 3e you can ...

Try looking up 'binomial distribution', pretty sure Wiki has a nice page on it. You're basically asking for n trials, with a 1/3 chance of success on each individual trial, and counting successes, which is easily addressed via a binomial distribution calculation (and there might be charts somewhere ...

Except the goal of D&D is not to be a simulation, but a game. Sometimes, the simulation has to take a backseat to things like ease of play and balance. The D&D I played growing up was 2e, which has a lot of cool ideas, but was always a nightmare to actually run. 2e had so many fiddly little...

I think it's rather scary that someone who works in an engineering field can be innumerate, but I guess it happens. Back to the point, certainly, you can get some theoretically stupid results on some arbitrarily slapped together simulator...but if you work on a simulator for 30 years, it usually doe...

In that case, if you're looking for rules to modify individual figures, I'd look to adapting what was done towards the end of MW, namely using cards to put special equipment and pilots into 'mechs. Go blow $20 or so, probably less, to buy some newer MW boosters to get some ideas for how WK did it, t...

Didn't someone do more or less this with the "Solaris 7" rules for Mechwarrior...of course, Wizkids shut them down since the rules turned MW into a fun game where mechs weren't a liability on the battlefield. Anyway, that's what you should do. Take the 'main' game, and tweak the rules to m...

I keep trying to get used to them, but it's tough. When I try to respond to a post, I have to log in....then I get dumped out to the community section, so I have to go back into the forums and find what I'm trying to respond to. They seemed to have lost my old name; they've put an unused alt name fo...

I dunno, has it been 5 minutes? 3 minutes? 9 minutes? I think your concern doesn't work any better than with what we have now. We already have a sucky real-time aspect, along with a sucky gamist aspect that makes characters abominations once they start using their powers outside of combat--I'm not j...

Alternatively, get rid of the whole "encounter/at will" crap, and change it to "hourly/quarter-hourly", or at least "hourly/at-will", with at-willls being a whole lot less powerful than Seal. The real issue is it's way too good for at-will...but putting more things on c...

Astral Seal is a classic power creep ability. Reducing defenses by two, at least in a large party, will deal more damage via other successful attacks than any of the other cleric at-wills, PLUS it does uber healing. The darn thing STACKS with combat advantage, which is bloody annoying. Toss in its +...

I feel so old, so fucking old. Where did my game go? Where is the healing, the searching, the carefully examning the items of treasure, the post mortum discussions on how we really fucked up the last encounter and how we need to get our act together? Unnecessary ? That was half the game and half of...

Certainly a good overview of how little effort it takes to effectively double any particular character's healing surges. You can call surges a limited resource, but after a certain point, they're about as limited as grains of sand. But, and this important, you also need to compare this level of heal...

There is no context to otherwise tell me you mean statistically as compared to arithmatically. However, your complaint that healing is too good is also affected by your large party. You have to leaders and a other characters grabbing healing powers. Yes your players have more healing than the game ...

So, basically, your eyes simply cannot see the word 'mathematically'? Or is it your brain cannot process the concept?

Yes, the 16 hp is the maximum...it's also the minimum. And, yes, a feat does that. A single, obvious, very useful, feat that can be easily chosen by a player.

Doom3114 I have seen none of the effects you are talking about. I don't see how your characters in the 8-9-10 range are getting +20 to healing. Also, out of combat if you knock somebody down its straight up 4 surges to get them to full. I assume this means that you are letting your players use the ...

Those 'save ends' effects get much less reliable at higher levels, though. Between Delver's Armor, numerous 'gets another save' effects, and classes like Warden or Dreadnaught/paragon, it's really tough to put much on player characters that'll last over a round, if that long, and that's not consider...

Doom314, how many encounters do you run in a workday? I'm frankly kind of skeptical about the claim that healing pwns you if you actually do the '4-5 combats in a day' that D&D expects you to do; you'll probably run out of healing surges before the workday ends if you whore that much. No way, p...

There's a few important things to understand here: 1) Whoring healing is only good if the DM lets you take extended rests all the time. If he is, he is "doing it wrong". If you have to go through 5 encounters, you're better off having a more balanced party which can take down the monsters...

To just go with the first thing, 'streamlined combat'...that's a croc. At first level, yeah, I suppose, but here are the effects that came up last combat I played (party of 6 vs versus yuan-ti, level 10ish), and these are hardly atypical: Ranger Quarry Warlock Curse Fighter Mark Poisoned 5, save end...

I know there's a genetic resistance to change, but...damn, that place looks horrible now.