The Gaming Den

You could look at it as the players knowing that, barring some exceedingly stupid decisions on their parts, they won't face any totally, permanently affecting consequences like death or whatever, but their characters not necessarily being aware of that. D&D is all about layering veils of illusio...

I've been playing KotOR 2 for a while, with one of the restored content mods. However, I just couldn't get into it. Currently I'm in that underground base of Telos, and I literally cannot muster up the motivation to play any more. After that needlessly long and tedious opening (that was only interes...

I'm not sure if every Covenant, Cult, and Important Supernatural Individual needs the history book treatment. However, that last section you just added in Persona non Grata really managed to give a lot of information and flavor without taking 17K words to do so. More of that nature would be exceedin...

You're right: the minimized penalty to additional attacks and the extra AoO's. My bad, those had slipped my mind.

I guess I'd rather penalize players for things they have control over (their actions) rather than things they don't have control over (the whims of the Dice Gods). As I personally witnessed in a campaign I ran a couple of years ago when, because of a combination of tricky fights, bad luck, and bad d...

I suspect, for Roy, "never failing" means that the PC's will always, always, always succeed, because of DM fiat if necessary, even if they do something totally stupid, like singlehandedly attacking the orcish empire at 2nd level. Whereas, for mean liar and others (including myself), "...

Races of War. Unless they're thinking of something else, it's not really a "fix" per se, more like the addition of the Edge system that rewards people for choosing the high-BAB classes, even when that high BAB does not significantly affect your attack rolls in ways that a medium BAB would ...

Adventures that feature a lot of NPC's, especially martial ones, are going to be almost certainly a lot easier than normal (however, if you just increase the number of enemies rather than individual power levels, this tends to be mitigated while also increasing the "epicness" of the advent...

It's the whole "if everyone's special then no one's special" situation. If everyone in the party gets one totally hardcore artefact in extremely short succession, then what the players will almost certainly think is, "Oh, the DM just contrived a bizarre situation just so that we'll al...

Irony of the weather: I live in the Cleveland area, which was just named the Worst Weather City in continental 'mrrka, and this winter has been one of the mildest in recent memory. I mean, I've had to shovel the driveway like three times total.

Generally, evil is the fast-track to power. Creating game mechanics to represent that is fine. Because that creates asymmetrical power and penalizes people for choosing certain concepts over others. AKA Not Good Game Design The only way I could possibly justify "evil-as-fast-track" would ...

I scale metamagic feats off of the "magic-y" skills, which are basically modified versions of Spellcraft, Arcana, Religion, and the Planes. This means that "metamagic feats" per se do not exist, but it allows sorcerers and medium casters like bards to not be screwed over too much...

CatharzGodfoot wrote: Do I detect a functional programmer?

Not as it so happens.

I mean, look at the Devoted Spirit level 9. It's a level 6 spell. That's a level 9 maneuver. 6/=9.

And 99% of the Desert Wind is just pile-o-d6's, which is not useful. At all.

You say that the Camarilla decided to stop having slaves on June 19, 1965. However, you also say that this is nearly two months after Lee surrendered.

Is this a simple typo, or a bit of a subtle joke?[/b]

Sorcerers can be almost as good as a wizard or shockingly useless, depending on the spells they choose to learn. Psions are sorcerers with a shittier spells-per-day system, (to me at least) bizarre flavor, and a smaller variety of spells. As long as a campaign has a lot of time to scribe scrolls and...

Thanks. I had forgotten all about Patience of the Mountains and assumed that immortality was just a flavor thing.

Brief query: Barring the intervention of bullets, do lycanthropes live forever? Dealing with immortality seems to be a general theme for aWoD, and every other player-friendly group of supernaturals (with the possible exception of Transhumans, and maybe Witches) seems to be immortal. It would therefo...

Because 3.x is filled with a bunch of "you must be this tall to adventure here" signs, and characters need a +x item at level y in order to meet said requirements. Races of War (I think) just gives the optional rule of letting characters cast greater magic weapon 1/day or something; simila...

Minor word-usage error: In the "Caught" section of "Long Chases," you say "effect" when you should say "affect." Typing error: In the section on Leviathan Spawn, the second last sentence begins " Hey become Leviathan spawn..." Also, does anyone have ...

So, it seems that druids and wildshape in particular have been getting a lot of attention lately. Given that I had been meaning to do a wildshape-focused class for a while, this discussion gave me the impetus necessary to actually write it. Now, of course, the question is, is it any good? Some brief...

If human flesh is really like crystal meth, then I'm not surprised that the average zombie is able to run like a kenyan and produce somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 spawn...

I will always bear an undying hatred for the Dynasty Warriors (and that random japanese version) games. A lot of my friends love them, but I find them all incredibly pointless and tedious. Concerning Halo, I have the first one for PC and it's pretty good. Not as good as, say, Half-life 1 or 2 or Sho...

Were any of the bloodied mechanics any good? I think I might have skimmed through the book once at a store, but I remember pretty much nothing. (is there maybe some "skull lord" creature with multiple heads that fall off as it's damaged?)

But was the last administration really "Republican?" Infringing on freedom-check Basing policy based on religion instead of, you know, thinking-check Rampant election corruption (cough, cough, Ohio in 2004)-check Huge favoring of the wild, free market-check Lotsa high-ups being former Big...