The Gaming Den

The discworld novels have werewolves and vampires and trolls and fairies in them, and they're not dark. But they're also more of a "standard fantasy" setting, so I dunno if that's what you're looking for.

Yeah, my generalizations might have been a bit too obscure. What I was trying to get across was, Good characters are unwilling to do Evil things in order to accomplish Good acts. Whereas Evil characters have no problem doing Good things so long as it's all for some overarching Evil purpose. Or they ...

Hi, I'm Alex.

I've only been yelled at once (by Frank). I don't post a lot.

Yeah, this is really good. There are maybe a thousand ways to define Good and Evil, and a million to define Law and Chaos, but this definition might actually work. (I personally ditched Law and Chaos and then just have Good=helping people in a Kantian "ends justify the means" way, Evil=I d...

The problem with using traits is that they're yet another layer of +1/-1s that you have to take into account but will never notice and will probably forget that you have over time, unless said carrots of vertical advancement are taken along with more little +1s that now give your character a +9001 t...

actually d6, but he did have Wizard BAB. Of course, that's just like Incarnate above, and the original had 2 good saves (Will/Fort) instead of just 1 (Will). Of course, they get less skill points... but that's kind of not important anyway. One of my players played as one for like levels 5-9, once. ...

The only problem with old starting characters is that you have to come up with an explanation of why, after being around for 700 years, they're still only level 1 or whatever. Given the crazy-low social mobility of the average D&D world, it seems kinda illogical that some old geezer could just p...

Anklodons: more like big Kappa with mace tails than anything. Totally distinguishable from Orcs and Goliaths because they are slow-to-anger herbivores with frickin mace tails that they can only attack an enemy that is flanking them with the enemy they are attacking with their actual melee weapon. F...

Individual XP/ Different leveled PCs/ XP costs : The concept that your party is of different levels and some PCs get more powerful characters than others is bullshit. Similarly paying with things with your XP is a bad idea. In my games, I do quest-based XP that all PC's get equally, but I also give...

But distinct tiers would be the perfect time to announce a fundamental shift in the way combat is played. The "squares" characters take up could get bigger as they tier up. So tier 1 might be 5 fight for a human-sized dude, then tier 2 might be 20 or 30 (representing the ability to take on...

And if you don't want things to progress to that point, your only option is to not play at the higher levels where the enemy is seriously a Rimtursar. That's why I really like the idea of having separate tiers of advancement that each consist of several levels. Within a tier, you wouldn't necessari...

I suspect what K means by "support character" in this case is someone whose primary function is to either heal people or give them static bonuses/enemies static penalties. Deciding who to stun, or where to place the stone wall in order to funnel the action toward the tactically superior lo...

A bit more paragraph spaceage would make this eminently more readable, I think.

Every game is "exception-based," to some extent, but most people dislike 4E because it really hits the roof with making nearly every power "unique" in that it won't necessarily be anything like another power called the same thing. (I think, in another thread Frank mentioned how i...

More magic item descriptions and the extended skill write ups would be lovely, I think.

Not necessarily. If he's trying to destroy the world, he might have a significant portion of his minions out doing important but not essential tasks. (maybe rounding up additional allies, killing people who might be a problem later on, etc.) These missions, while useful, are almost certainly seconda...

But even then, it's way easier to attack an unalert enemy than an alert one. If the bad guys know that there is an enemy who has attacked before and is likely to do so again, they're more like to a) be extra watchful for the slightest hint of threat, b) wear their bigbad armor and carry their bigbad...

Well, that's...unfortunate. To put it lightly.

This is probably an unnecessary question, but I'm assuming that copies of Mass Effect purchased via Steam are free of any weird copyright protection issues?

Yeah, I've found the scripting system to have some serious flaws. Most notable are its tendency to use health poultices/lyrium potions right after the last enemy has just been killed , in spite of the crazy fast regeneration rates and generally low supply of healing items. Your allies also seem to h...

Yeah, Mind Blast and the telekinetic powers are pretty much pure jesus. Crowd control abilities are a total must. And mages are teh winnzor, unsurprisingly.

Even though a character with a Terminal Wound is going to be dead before a sufficient timeframe would pass to provide a healing test, a character is always allowed one Healing Test just before they die. Is "though" really the most appropriate word here? To me at least, "if" seem...

@Kaelik: Ah, I see what you meant now. I hadn't even thought to look for that much detail. I was thinking more how much of a penalty all those Entropy debuffs and such actually deal, and the range of damage for spells. How they calculate Resistance checks and DC's (or whatever they're called) would ...

...pardon?

Well, I'm about 10-12 hours into Dragon Age, and I must say that I'm really, really enjoying it. There are a lot of things that are bugging me so far (you can't attack non-hostile NPC's, the outdoor environments are really rail-y, most of the numbers are hidden, you can only interact with certain NP...