The Gaming Den

Some people are simply not willing to perform any suspension of disbelief or thinking about mechanics whatsoever. Yes. years later "dissociated mechanics" still means "I have infinite amounts of mind-caulk for magical characters and zero mind-caulk for non-magical characters because ...

I snickered at Yas Queen, I admit. By the way, I feel the same way that long reviews take a lot out of me. When I did a review of War of the Burning Sky, I tried to chop it down as minimally as possible, and I still was barely able to get through the last few installments! So I take my hat off and s...

As a big Champions fan back in the day, I'll vote for Strike Force (a book that came out just as my interest in Champions was waning).

My favourite Aaron Allston book is probably Autoduel Champions, with rules for superheroes in Car Wars and autodueling in the Hero system!

The Warblade and Swordsage's "use a full action or attack action to recover something battle worthy" idea is cool... does any D&D5e class do that? Does any not-D&D RPG make that part of the core gameplay? Champions (HERO System) allowed you to use a full round action to recover (n...

I think most of the stories I want to tell as an MC are just... not D&D stories? For myself, the type of stories I'd be interested in writing would have some kind of unusual twist to them, but the type of D&D campaigns I like to play in are relatively straightforward. The "fun for the ...

As a D&D player whose favourite character has always been the cleric, I like having a lot of deities to choose from but I care zero about having separate pantheons for separate races. At a bare minimum, you sort of need a separate god for each class (e.g. a god of justice for paladins, a god of ...

pragma wrote: ↑

Sun Jul 11, 2021 7:02 am

[..] I think E6 is terribly limiting in 5e. 5e is in the pocket during levels 5-11, so Brancalonia misses a lot of the good stuff.

To be fair, I frequently heard the same criticism about E6 under 3E/Pathfinder too.

The other side of the coin is, again, Shadowrun. There is a skill for every last single language you can think of. And a few more. With specializations too. So, where is the middle ground you are looking for? The most elaborate language skill system I've seen in an RPG is from the Hero System sourc...

K wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 17, 2021 9:38 pm

The lesson to be learned from 5e is that people wanted cleaner rules, nice things for fighting-people, and that min-max culture is bad for the hobby.

I would add the lesson that churning out a million splatbooks is over-rated (except as a way to keep splatbook writers employed).

I still get a kick out of people declaring the death of 5E D&D back in 2014.

For those not in the know, City of Brass' earlier incarnation was a city-based planar metropolis made during the final years of the 3.5 era, with some accompanying adventures. You probably know this, but it's worth pointing out that the City of Brass was mentioned in D&D long before 3.5. It was...

Leather tanning used to be a very dirty, smelly business.

So far, this sounds like a system that a 10-year-old wrote in a day. "Uh, so there's a target number and you roll dice to beat that target number. Yay! I'm an RPG writer!"

My (hazy) recollection of Spheres of Power was that the various spheres were wildly unbalanced (e.g. one sphere might be giving save-or-lose abilities at level 1 and another sphere might take all of your resources to build the equivalent of a very minor 3.5E spell). Is it a bit more balanced in this...

Musketeer is our second subclass, representing gunslingers who mix things up with some swordplay. I get why you would do it, but naming the subclass who use melee weapons as well as firearms after a firearm seems less than ideal. They cribbed the name from the Pathfinder archetype presumably, along...

But if you mean to say that D&D has no obvious literary inspirations, this is very wrong. I think the point is that if you literally transcribed the events of a D&D game campaign to a novel, it would not feel like a classic fantasy novel (even if it was an entertaining game campaign). Altho...

What are archetypes in the context of Pf2? Because... In Pf1, you just *take* archetypes, ostensibly at level 1, but if someone's looking at an archetype that doesn't change anything at level 1, I wouldn't care about them not committing to it until the level it actually changes things. My understan...

I've kind of stopped paying attention to tabletop RPGs for a couple of years. Does anyone know if Pathfinder 2E has any kind of popularity? Or are Pathfinder 1E fans sticking to the original version? Or is everyone playing 5E D&D nowadays?

A simple etymology search would refute your claim about the word orc. If you can find a couple of pre-Tolkien sources that talk about a race of orcs, I'd love to see them. Bonus points if they hate elves. Beowulf. Beowulf has exactly one mention of some unspecified bugaboos called "orcneas&quo...

Harshax wrote:A simple etymology search would refute your claim about the word orc.

If you can find a couple of pre-Tolkien sources that talk about a race of orcs, I'd love to see them. Bonus points if they hate elves.

Orc was a word long before Tolkien and anything can be half-something. The word "half-elven" was used approximately zero times before Tolkien. The word "orc" meaning "a brutish, aggressive, ugly and malevolent race of monsters" was used approximately zero times before ...

Didn't Gygax claim at one point that there was only minimal inspiration from Lord of the Rings and that any mention of hobbits, ents, orcs and half-elves was only coincidental?

The Three Musketeers presumably had firearms, although I don't specifically remember them using them.

I played in two play-by-post Kingmaker games that both died during Stolen Lands. One time we were skull-fucked by a shambling mound and the other one just petered out. A Shambling Mound averages 12 damage on each slam attack, has reach, and can attack twice per round! Don't forget the +16 Stealth ch...

ColorBlindNinja61 wrote:Aren't some of the NPCs in Pathfinder walking around with illegal builds? I seem to remember one their Monks having feats they didn't qualify for.

I think they had a few issues with some of the pre-gen characters for their organized play campaign.