The Gaming Den

If so, will you please drop your fucking "but the 1s happen on an Appraise check!" argument? No, because you are assuming that the 1s happening on those checks have no bearing on the number of 1s that are likely to be rolled. If that's the case, then there's no reason for things to get wo...

Do you want fights to be over in 1-3 strikes, or do you want combat to take many, many turns as two opponents wear each other down to create an opening for a killing blow?

Notice also that your calculations are totally ignoring all the other rolls, assuming that a 1 will come up primarily with the rolls that can kill you? That is what the probability represents: the poor roll that kills your character. It is not the chance that your enemy scores a crit, or the chance...

If you turn the game into a GM versus PC thing, the PCs lose. Under your system, if the GM is more tactically minded than the Players, the PCs lose. Why? Simple. Fucking. Attrition. I don't know anyone that would willingly slam their dick in that car door repeatedly. How about a "PCs vs. NPCs ...

0.000625% per set of four. However, I'm not sure that Elennsar meant that good=20 and bad=1. "Success by 5 or more (at least!)" "Failure by 5 or more (ditto)" Does this then mean that in situations where you cannot succeed or fail by 5 or more that your opponent is untouchable o...

The trust that the GM will not play his NPCs with unrealistic levels of omniscience? Seriously, if the GM is determined to be a dick, no rule short of trying to eliminate the GM role entirely (which is not necessarily desirable) will make it impossible for him to be a dick. So don't play with GMs w...

2. Tactics. A lot of upsets in military and sports come from having a really good game plan that nobody was expecting. If you can't mimic "beating the odds" on dice, let the players beat the odds through superior planning and strategy. Which is fine - what is not fine is that NPCs are too...

You could have a crude solution where the GM just states at the beginning of any given combat whether or not it carries the risk of death. Maybe there's only a certain number of times he can do that per adventure or level, or it can only be activated vs. bosses or named characters. However, in any s...

Well, how miserable can you be saving lives, sleeping around and doing drugs?

Ah, my mistake, I though we were talking in a more 4e sense.

On BoG specifics, why not make the BoGs class specific? To borrow from annoying 4e terminology, would giving the striker a "you're coming with me" BoG, the defender a "last stand" BoG, the leader a "group revitalizing" BoG, etc. work out? [tangent] I really wish we cou...

Yeah, I don't know how I feel about "Last Stand" type mechanics. I suppose I'm slightly against them. Though I do endorse some sort of turnaround or comeback mechanics, because that's just cool. Maybe with the KO idea the character can suffer a wound each time they're reduced to zero or fe...

Not when it was as difficult and arduous and etc. etc. as running down to the store. When there were actual obstacles that actually had to be worried about because the difference between "do we take the left fork or the right fork" had actual consequences, yes. You cannot do this in a gam...

As a courtesy to your request, I try to adhere to 0) make no assumptions. You always want to give the players the option to come up with creative, oddball solutions to problems without arbitrarily demanding that they adhere to certain assumed behaviors. The caveat is that players should think out th...

Then you figure out a better way to phrase this statement: The odds of Benedict Arnold managing to reach Canada with a sufficiently large and healthy force to be capable of posing any threat to Quebec were poor. Stop using the phrase "the odds" in those situations. The "odds" of...

You can make a very compelling argument that any of your "improbable" historical events were indeed the only possible outcome, given proper knowledge of the influence of all preceding factors and events. Please do me the favor of reading the history of Arnold's invasion of Canada and then...

This is not at all a slight on the genre, but when does it stop being MacGuyveresque? One would think that after the fifth session (or even the first), wearing the garlic and tattooing a sunwheel on your neck stops being 'creative'. If anything, the party starts having to fight against ingenuity th...

And I refuse to accept that "cold hard math" = ABSOLUTE UNSHAKABLE TRUTH, because it has been repeatedly demonstrated in history that "improbable" can happen. Jesus Tap-dancing Christ! The only reason historical events are "improbable" is because of an imperfect knowle...

In "real play" the one time that a wizard casts a death spell at the party rogue that he can only resist on a 17+ makes up for the 30 prior encounters where the actual death chance was nil. More or less. And the rogue certainly could roll his 17 only when he needs one. If that was the cas...

No. That is not what I or anyone else here has said. What we have said is that it is very unlikely you will survive to the end of a long string of challenges with any chance of death. As far as I know, no one has said that it is a certainty except for you when you straw-man probability. It is very ...

Provided you have some form of rudimentary intelligence and capacity to follow directions, the omlette will eventually get made. It might not be the best omlette in the world and it might have taken you far longer to make than normal, but at that point you're getting into questions of quality and s...

1) 100% certainty of character survival is a BAD thing to me. It is BORING and unbelievable. This statement made me think of something to ask you: do you generally dislike it when something in game is a mathematical certainty? If a player says, "I don't need to roll for that" because thei...

VitM: Because if you gave me a cookbook, the ingredients for an omlette, and waited for me to make breakfast, you'd be better off ordering take out. The same is NOT true for say, my mother, given the stuff. Not because my mother is inherently more awesome, but because I don't have the knowledge to ...

Why can't magic seriously be like cooking? Where anyone who follows the recipe properly winds up with an omlette?

Elennsar, if you were reasonably confident that you will succeed on any given save versus death because your d20 always rolls a 7+, if I was your DM, I'd make you roll a different die. Now, when you sit down with friends to start a campaign, how long do you envision yourself playing that character? ...