The Gaming Den

Read on here that you can go from lvl 1 to 20 in the in-world time of less than a year. Drizzt is still slicing up orc mooks even after battling big demons and big liches, so maybe this wonky multiclassing can work if we acknowledge that 'level appropriate challenge' is not how the game is expected...

In D&D, the construct type is meant to model a small subset of possible monsters, almost all of whom were created by wizards in specific settings. If, in your bionicle world, almost everything is a "construct", you should probably just start from scratch, decide what types of construct...

Did the ever accidentally create an OK multiclass NPC like fighter1/barbarian1/rogue1 You occasionally see Rogue/Fighters and the like. I remember the king of the terrible in that department being Elminster. Although, I think his most current statblock is in the Epic Level Handbook. Yeah, you open ...

Early 3.0 products (especially third-party adventures) tend to have heavily multiclassed spellcasters that just flat-out don't present level-appropriate challenges. That sort of multiclassing was a valid life decision in AD&D and 2E, and it took a bit for people to realize that 3E was different....

Assume that I know nothing about Magic at all, because I don't.

I see that list of banned cards. It could be good -- WotC has gotten better at identifying when they've goofed -- or it could be bad. If it's bad, then how does this badness square with MaRo's high-minded theory articles?

Chamomile did a nice writeup on mystery adventures in his blog . He suggests building a directed graph where nodes are scenes, edges are clues, and each node has at least three edges. At first glance, Chamomile's post seems pretty derivative of the Alexandrian articles MGuy mentioned. That's totall...

When I see articles like this, it gives me the impression that MtG has remained a pretty well-designed and well-thought-out game. But then I look at things like your other thread (http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=57646), and you flat-out say that most of the Kamigawa set was pretty boring. So, what ...

You have that completely backwards. You're saying that more robust experience must be some freeform jazz storytelling bullshit precisely because it requires more rules, not less. You're saying there's no rules because you don't know how you'd build rules for luring warcamps, making goblinoid allian...

"Beer and pretzels" implies, to me, gaming that is casual and low-thought. That seems orthogonal to the embedded / non-embedded distinction. I have no idea how you would [...] start exploiting the situation into which we've dropped our orc warcamp. Maybe they look at the map and sees that...

In ye olde days, we would have called your "unembedded" game a "beer and pretzels" game. I.e., something you don't have to think about too hard in order to play. I think that might be backwards, in an "embedded" game then sometimes you get turned into a vampire and jus...

First, Orion: I found your post kind of difficult to read and understand. You talk about a lot of specific examples and terms but never spell out what you mean by "embedded" until the end. I'd recommend rewriting a bit. Second, the novel "embedded" and "non-embedded" te...

fuck. considering how Kingmaker bricked the entire concept of how you play D&D I doubt Wrath will be any less of a rocket tag adventure than the PnP version. what are these guys doing? frikkin russians... How did Kingmaker brick D&D gameplay? Did it all follow on from real-time-with-pause, ...

OgreBattle wrote:Was there a popular Conan d20 at that time? The race/culture skillpoint thing seems very similar.

Conan d20 didn't come out until 2004, looks like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan:_Th ... aying_Game). I don't know if there was an early sword & sorcery hack for d20.

Are there any entertaining videos or articles that highlight how wacky/fun DO2 'physics' interactions can get? I've seen "Set fire to explosive thing, explosion" "here's a puddle of blood, curse/electrify", but do things slide and bounce and fall in interactive ways? Here's one:...

Would you ever play just d20? Where you stripped all the names of creatures and abilities away and you were just running combats where it was "Unit number 32 moves to square A12 and activates ability 4c"? I sure wouldn't, I'd rather play tetris or connect 4. This is pretty close to what t...

angelfromanotherpin wrote:In GURPS Technomancer overuse of Cure Disease spells has created bacteria with heightened Magic Resistance.

Is it only technomancers that can cure disease, or can mages do it as well?

To be perfectly honest, I'd describe "high-level" single player Stellaris as more of a toy than a game. The PvP community find things to be well-balanced with a rather short banlist. Do people actually care about competitive PvP for Paradox games? I've spent dozens of hours dicking around...

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote: What if [blacksmithings]'s a fairly sustainable lifestyle and I can just go do that? Should I be able to open up my own smithy and get some apprentices and start selling my shit and make the game about that?

Probably not, that sounds super boring for the other players in your elfgame

If anyone hasn't seen this blog post that sketches out The Hobbit specifically as a sword-and-sorcery setting, it's worth a read.

I reread Lord of the Rings for the first time in many years recently, and it struck me just how aesthetically specific Middle-Earth is. For Tolkien, every elf is noble, every orc is foul, Gollum is pathetic but tragic, and so on. (This is no by means a novel observation, just one I fully appreciated...

The latest Chapo episode from the Iowa Caucus may be the single greatest podcast recording ever made. I've never felt more seen by a piece of media. That shit was a powerful powerful episode. If anyone wants to listen; it's wild good https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/390-live-from-iowa-city-s...

Does the Shivhad have any ability to deal with flying dudes using ranged effects, or is it Tarrasque-equivalent in its vulnerabilities?

(Seriously, did anyone other than Gygax give a shit about Jack Vance?) In a word, yes? More seriously, I would consider Vance to be one of the better prose stylists the fantasy genre has produced. Any list of fantasy classics that doesn't include Eyes of the Overworld and Cugel's Saga is seriously ...

3rd edition making it the pseudo default didn't really work because FR had supplanted the setting so thoroughly in the 90s. As somebody who started with 3e and never read any of the Forgotten Realms stuff, I think the bigger issue is that there was never a one page overview of Greyhawk in a 3e non-...

tussock's description of Eberron is impressively bad. There's a lot you can criticize about the setting, and you can make reasonable arguments about whether or not it's particularly suited to the d20 paradigm, but "There was a war that has ended and now everyone just gets along" just isn't...