The Gaming Den

We should ignore completely swords kept for keepsake purposes. They are about as important as keeping your mothers necklace or a picture of your family. Its only the mechanical decisions made from a roleplaying perspective that we should think about, e.g. vow of poverty, using a subpar sword because...

What I'd like is to be able to make up creatures during the combat. For example if the PCs are robbing a bank and city guards come up I want to be able to come up with their basic tactics, their AC by the time they get attacked, their attack modifiers by the time they attack and their saves on the s...

Actually, I apologise Frank. The first half of my post was confrontational and stupid. It was obvious you'd just made a mistake. I should have just commented and suggested you change it. No idea why I got so bitchy. [hr] I agree with others that magic being straight out better is stupid. While overp...

[EDIT: removed stupid bitching at Frank about a mistake] [hr] To me, Frank's post shows that building up a fire is slow and that the fire needs to be affecting them for more than 5 seconds. It would mean that magical fire needs to be insanely hot, last a couple of seconds, be on a par with Greek Fi...

Are you trying to say that societal constructs and social mores should be more pronounced and important in games? Yes ... I'm not so sure about this. Is this the American societal constructs, the global societal constructs, the country and area the game is happening in, or the fictional society's? ...

I was thinking that it could be interesting to have magic only able to affect things a certain distance away from you. So, you can create really hot fire but it only goes a couple of metres away, far enough away that someone can rush you with a knife and have a decent chance of hitting you. As well ...

Looking back over this thread I realised something. I caused the Dwarf Beard Ruling. I'm sorry guys. I was DMing a game where one character wanted to be a Dwarven Defender. His character was very proud of his beard. Very proud. However, he fell into a pungee pit and kobolds threw flasks of alchemist...

Elennsar still hasn't answered this question: Elennsar, I don't understand what you want or even mean when you say a system should encourage roleplaying. Would you please clarify? In Arturius you sidestep encouraging heroism by filtering the players so they all want to play heroes anyway. Other syst...

Okay, how about this: Some MMORPGs have started having two weapon and armour slots: one for what you look like and one for the mechanical benefits. We could do something similar. You do use the most up to date weapons but it is described as being your chosen weapon. However you get a -1 to hit and d...

Roy: Your basic question was: I want to know why smart play is actually a problem. This has been answered many a time. Basically because people don't like it and it is tactically uninteresting. [hr] Your next question was: And what is the alternative? These people have tried suggesting alternatives:...

The game should encourage people who actually want to roleplay roleplaying. Heh heh. I like this image of your PCs playing a roleplaying game. Yeah yeah yeah, I get what you meant, it was just amusing. [hr] I'd be very disappointed in it if it made it just another mechanic to be used to gain bonuse...

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You seem to be saying that you should leave it as it is: the player gets enough self-fulfilment from roleplaying the character continuing to honour his father. I'd consider that a very good thing - and more importantly, I'd consider the game having "When you get to level 8 you find your father...

I think its down to the basic level system: a level X character should have numbers in the range A-B for the things they're good at. However, if a level X character has numbers smaller then A then they are not a level X character. If a character decides to use their father's sword and due to this en...

I still think that Concentration should be discussed more. Its one of the two things about CON, but does bugger all. If you were to reduce how important CON is to HP but increase the other effectiveness it could be useful. I think it should be used to ignore pain effects, ignore fatigue and have elv...

Now I don't have Aspergers. And I don't have that much experience with it: I've only done a small amount of psychology and talked to my brother who has it. But as far as I know people with Autism, including Aspergers, have a less developed theory of mind. As in they don't instinctively understand th...

If they're only a little over 1% of the population, they're hardly typical, though. Yeah, but if you include Aspergers and other similar mental traits ( about 1% as well ) then > 2% of the population has to use their intelligence to calculate what others are thinking and work out how to manipulate ...

I don't think that's Lago's point. I think he means that all the best manipulators are capable of getting masters in psychology. Manipulation is more a skill than an ability. Consider psychopaths. Based on Robert Hare and the PCL-R, they can't empathise at all and don't really have emotions but are ...

How about 1, at the same time as adding more uses for Con. Maybe add a skill called Endure or something that is based on Con and replaces the checks for running for long periods, ignoring fatigue on a per round basis, ignoring pain effects, staying conscious below 0hp, ummm...., some other stuff? Me...

Yeah, I did say that its still a terrible idea, just that its better than hitting yourself, embarrassing yourself or losing your weapon. J__E: Thats yet another statistic to keep track of. And from what your saying ... then they actually miss an attack on the 17th 1 that is rolled. it seems to mean ...

Not to mention that even if the fumble is basically harmless, but still goes beyond a mere auto miss, it demonstrates incompetence. Therefore, you become more incompetent with level, as it happens more often. Do beatsticks really need to be thought of as useless anymore than they already are? I def...

In my experience having a grid map and putting trees on it gets really really complex. Firstly the DM often has no real idea of what woodland looks like and so tropical rainforest or other exotic woodland is hard to do and secondly putting trees on a grid is laborious and argumentative. Then there's...

Well, every now and then I tried to get it back on the topic of what a hero is, and how to roleplay heroic or risky behaviour. But... yeah, it needs closing. Who cares? You're horribly organized - more so than most people on these forums. I care, because I'm sick of people thinking that they're enti...

First of all, its good that you're answering the 19 questions. Some of your answers are a bit vague still but they are still interesting. However.... What are the victory conditions to the campaign? If you were playing in this campaign, what would you be doing to try to win. I already answered this,...

So how do you actually win? Its obviously not a find the McGuffin adventure, nor is it kill the BBEG. You lose if you run out of soldiers or the Dux dies, but winning? Drive off the barbarians. Killing their warlord might help in that - but good luck, to say the least. This really isn't good enough...