The Gaming Den

I think non-magical encounter powers make more sense that magical ones. I mean, if you use a feint or backflip or something an enemy is going to be prepared for it next time, but I see you reason why I get one Fireball and not two per set of enemies. But with encounter powers there is never a "...

In a system like that of D&D where wizards prepare spells before to cast them it make sense there is a magic item tht can store pre-prepared spell in large number. Now, maybe it is just me but I think wands got boring with 3e. In 2e and previous they were much more interesting Wands usually have...

Seriously, Titanium Dragon, the highest ranked 4rry on the planet decided to make the argument that since "millions" of books is composed of "hundreds of thousands" of books, that court documents saying that WotC had sold "hundreds of thousands" really meant that they ...

Probably it is nothing weird for 4e but I find interesting that with hypnotism you can make a monster attack itself.

Also I'm not familiar with 4e but when power's target is "a creature" it means the caster can use it on himself?

Was Magic Missile ever worth the space it took to write it in? I imagine that with the low hit point inflation in 2nd Edition it'd be useful for the first 9 or so levels when you would need something to take out an enemy at long range when weapons wouldn't do. In 2ed MM was very useful for that rul...

Regardless, if M:tG is still going well (showing that WotC, just D&D) what are the chances of Hasbro selling the D&D IP? Here's hoping that someone good will snatch it up. I'm no expert but from what I've heard around, chance is very little. To put it simple Hasbro just don't sell IPs. Mayb...

I like systems where the flaws give you something only when they are actually flaw, the best example I can think of is FATE. In FATe you technically don't have flaws, you have Traits and while you can have traits that are fully positive or negative it is more interesting to have some that can be use...

everything in this argument depend on the setting and this make the whole discussion more pointless than the average internet discussion. in some campaign an ogre, an illithid and a fiendish half-dragon(black) could walk into a tavern without a single brow being raised, in another a standard gnome ...

Well, it still depends on the setting. everything in this argument depend on the setting and this make the whole discussion more pointless than the average internet discussion. in some campaign an ogre, an illithid and a fiendish half-dragon(black) could walk into a tavern without a single brow bei...

RandomCasualty2 wrote:

A Man In Black wrote: No he's not, he just takes the ignore-radiant-immunity feat.

Which makes the game even less exciting.

They made a feat for that?!

If they didn't yet they certainly will.

After all, they must find some way to fill the next half dozen of player handbooks.

Have you ever read the descriptions of creatures in medieval bestiaries? There was all kind of crazy shit there I can't see why things should be different in a D&D world. That's the point. They had dragons and gryphons and hydras and nix nack nox and for crying out loud, they knew what these we...

I've always found the idea of tying knowledge skill DCs to CR to be insane. People know more about the big nasty animals and plants. Very few people can tell the difference between a sycamore and an elm, but lots of people can identify poison oak. And frickin everyone knows what a tiger is. The big...

But JE, that means people don't know they're being attacked by an dragon when an ancient red blows fire over their village. You don't need knowledge skills to know that a big flying lizard just set a bunch of stuff on fire. They just don't know if it was an ancient red, or a hellfire wyrm, or a hal...

This is basically the consequence of any gold valued magic item system, where you can simply trade one item for another. Regardless of how you assign value to items, at some point, there's going to be a winner's tier of items that come to the top. Gold isn't the important fact here. It's resource m...

Why does everyone bring up the "Gandalf can teleport" fallacy up? It's not a fallacy, it's a sound logical argument: p1. Wizards with access to 5th level spells in D&D can teleport p2. Gandalf is a wizard with access to 5th level spells c: therefore Gandalf teleport. Socratic Syllogis...

Maybe it is just me but I think that 4e would have been a better game if they dropped the whole "+1/2 level to everything".

Yeah, the (well, one of many) problem of 4e is that without magic items to buy/make you don't know what to do with all the mountains of gold that you find, it have it even worse than in 3.x, and that's saying something.

In 4e you can't gt by without enhancement bonuses. Enemy NPCs can, because their weapons become magical whenever they pick them up. But no such luck for PCs. If they don't constantly trade up weaponry they die. 4E would have been a whole lot better if it just handed out that automatic bonus to PCs ...

Ars magica system is made of five techniques (verbs, like create, change, destroy, etc, only in latin) and 10 forms (nouns, like earth, air, human, animal, etc, still in latin) each of them have a numeric value ranging from 0 to whatever you can pay for, a spell combine two of these to create an eff...

But if you're writing a system, you want to actually try to balance stuff, otherwise there's no point to writing the RPG in the first place if it doens't even work. A RPG system don't have to be balanced to works (e.g. Ars Magica). The problem is when a system is meant to be balanced but in reality...

first; are you saying that the only interesting use for magic would be to kill things? No he is saying its easier in an quasi-realistic system mmmh, no If you can't use magic on living creatures at all Ice9, then you really can't do much of anything interesting with magic. ... Similarly if you decl...

If you can't use magic on living creatures at all Ice9, then you really can't do much of anything interesting with magic. I grant that in the long run that may be balanced, but it also kind of defeats the point of having magic in the game. Similarly if you declare that hitting a moving target with ...

What is more important in the difficulty, power or precision? It sounds precision may be the more difficult. I think they should be two separate stats. I like the idea that you can have a mountain shattering wizard with no precision at all or a very fine manipulator but that can't handle anything m...

1) Mechanical Changes: Causing a door to open, or a crossbow to fire. Telekinesis is in this category, but generally uses a lot of power. This is enough. I suggest remote neck snapping. It's both low power and low precision. Much lower precision than firing a crossbow. And roughly the same amount o...

Look at it this way: How do you explain charm person realistically? Realistically charm person involves being able to induce current in someone's brain from a distance (repeatedly over the duration of the spell, even while they move) in order to change their opinions. And if you can do that you can...