The Gaming Den

Meanwhile once the war is on for real we not only get the occasional couple of paragraphs devoted to planning, Very occasional, and actual battle following up is even rarer. but also the occasional complete chapter where Tyrion Lannister does nothing but plan the battle of King's Landing. I don't t...

The first book alone has at least seven cases of gratuitous armed violence, List them. -Theon and Robb vs. Wildings.* -Clegane brothers at the tournament. -Tyrion and the party that captured him vs. mountain bandits.* -Jaime and his men vs. Ned and his men (vastly expanded in the TV series) -Bronn ...

Your examples here are: -A Song of Ice and Fire which, if anyone is paying attention, is actually quite allergic to depictions of actual onscreen violence, but revels in forming battle plans. Stop. You're talking out of your ass. The first book alone has at least seven cases of gratuitous armed vio...

The source material for D&D glosses over tactical scale combat just as much as it does kingdom management. You can estimate a character's level from how they behave in a fight, much the same way you could estimate a kingdom's wealth and unit specializations (or whatever) from their performance ...

On kingdom rules. Nobody wants to play kingdom management in DnD. When people say that they do, they either lie to themselves or engage in empty dreaming about attaching their favorite tabletop strategy (probably dealing with fixed inputs, unlike DnD, and generally vastly simpler) or even computer s...

Players, at least as far as I can tell for myself for my players' reactions, do give a shit about ecologies, at least insofar as they'll start wondering how the fuck villages even survive if everything is crawling with hyper dangerous predators, and what those predators eat when they have no adventu...

I've uploaded updated documents by the same link. https://yadi.sk/d/iLt9OCTusGGRg Besides small updates, typo fixing, etc in old documents, a document on moster types and a small sample of monsters is added. Also, a magic overview, a sample class (Wizard) and a small sample of simpler spells to writ...

Schwarzkopf wrote: Edit: Having just read this, I realize that one thing I'm going to have to do is tone down Tiamat's published stats A LOT.

I'm not sure what version of Tiamat charsheet the author of that article is smoking. As a rule 3.X era bigshots writeups are rather weak and poorly put together.

Wizards also can. But do you really think preparation full casters are currently not too complicated to run?

Stop projecting, PhoneLobster. You're the one throwing fits every time someone disagrees with you on something. Like right now. I didn't know that you also apparently keep a Book of Grudges for such cases, though. players heavily investing in planning for your encounters is somehow a fucking bad thi...

Retraining on session is completely unacceptable for gameplay reasons, PhoneLobster. The existing sources of customization for specific threats in 3.X, such as wizards spells, about whom supposedly nobody cared (except only in the bizarro world to which you periodically slide) are already quite suff...

How much breaks in a Big Feats paradigm if you hardcode from the very beginning in triplicate that you can just retrain all feats whenever you get a new feat slot? I don't think it would. In fact, I do think there is sufficient precedence in fiction where a character who undergones a massive power ...

This is an interesting line of argument, Frank (I'm not being sarcastic here). I'm going to think on it for a time.

If you got 5 feats per level, you would need 100 feats in the game just to have something to select for 20 levels for one character, realistically at least ten times more so that characters won't look like carbon copies. 3.5's PHB had only a bit over 100, including stinky "+2 to couple of skill...

More broadly, you should make the number of choices you get to make as high as possible. Further, you should make the number of choices that noticeably limit future choices to be as small as possible. Your character should be able to wear a red tunic or a blue one. Your character should be able to ...

If say, all fey creatures are vulnerable to iron (not some bullshit meteoric alchemical iron but your normal swords and arrows) and resistant to every other source of damage, would you consider them puzzle or reverse puzzle monsters?

Certainly people don't like leveling up as a homework. But ever since 3.0 that's just the reality of DnD, at least for long campaigns past low levels. Judging by the fact that it got worse in Pathfinder, having a lot of small powers in your system only contributes to it. Even in skill systems with p...

You know, Frank, I've wanted to rhetorically attack your argument I would have built my response about asking how the fuck big feats that you disparage are in any way different from classplosion of low-to-no-customization classes that you advocate. Both are essentially the same thing: pushing the sl...

And speaking of designing a Monster Manual first. That's how monster statblocks look like so far, using the most common first opponent of low-level adventurers as an example: GOBLIN Small Humanoid <1st level NPC class?> Hit Dice: 1d10 (6 hp) Initiative: +2 Speed: Land 3 Fortitude Defense: 10 (+2 bre...

2E' mechanics honestly were in a shitty middle, where you more often than not no longer could generate a character in 10 minutes, but customization was still sorely lacking for most classes. And I'm not sure who actually can like weapon specialization. I can see the point of not allowing classes the...

You seem to forget that I also have played in high-level DnD games myself, Frank. Of course, my experience is subjective, but so is yours. In my experience the chance of a GM allowing Arcane Thesis abuse is actually pretty good, but the chance of a GM allowing Charm to work as a better in all ways v...

I have to disagree with your thesis on pretty much every level, Frank. First, to deal with your faulty example of desing failures. Every class in 3.X (not considering the highest levels of optimization which I never saw in actual play) was at its peak when built for maximun synergy of abilities. A w...

I do not like the idea of narrow-theme classes and probably I won't ever like it. My problems with them (and solutions I prefer) are as follows: -If you write thematically narrow classes, you need to write a new class whenever you want to represent a character with a particular specialization and th...

So, in case of casters with limited spell lists, do you think that a class ability allowing you to automatically evolve your Entangle into Wall of Thorns (insert any two spells in different tiers from the same domain/sphere) once you qualify for the latter might be an adequate way to get around the ...

Warning, a long and possibly rambling post ahead, as I kept thinking while making it. So, about the same arguments for Shield, Erase and Burning Hands , Frank... Shooting magic blasts is far from the only things done by low-level spells that stays relevant even at high levels, as long as you can do ...