The Gaming Den

Anyway, I do actually have work to do so I'm going to take my leave. This has been... educational. Someone messaged me with a discussion of Rogues and brought the stealth errata in PHB2 to my attention, which was helpful. I never meant to play a Rogue... I only drew one up for my friend's game since...

@NineInchNall: The question I had wasn't how the one is better than the other. I included the reasoning in my original post. The question was how so many people could grasp the significance of a +1 and then turn around and dismiss the significance of a +2. If the choice is between one or the other, ...

FrankTrollman: Do you have a citation for the up and down? I'm looking at the definition as written in PHB... but I only looked at that because I was curious if they'd covered it.

@PsychicRobot: Again, it's situational. There was one fight that began with eight bowminions and ended with six as the last ones standing, and one where it became crucial to wipe them out so the party did. Downing a potion is a minor action. So is getting it out. If your battles don't give you any i...

A lot of 3D cheese can be thrown out by playing the rules as written... a conjuration that affects "adjacent squares", for instance, since the definition of adjacent squares as given is squares that have a side or corner touching. Squares, not notional cubes. As strictly written, blasts af...

@PsychicRobot:

I used all the space it takes to rebutt your Gauntlet crack. I don't play it that way. It works for me. You seem to play it that way. It doesn't work for you. How does this add up to "The game only works if you play it like Gauntlet?"

@PsychicRobot: And no, actually, just because I already started typing this up, I am going to respond to one of your more bizarre claims: that an extra six damage a round is nothing. First, context matters: the minions I'm describing are mid heroic tier. Their damage is an approximation based on an ...

@PsychicRobot: There's a lot here for me to respond to, and I'm working on responding to all of it. Well, I was working on responding to yours. I'm not any more.

Except I will point out that I responded to your Gauntlet crack.

@MartinHalper: Re: Xena Model. That works, too. It certainly makes more sense than the idea that you wait for the weapon to return and then throw it again. I suppose at the end of the day, the weapon is magic and what's happening is flavor. If somebody wants to have a knife that's a Xenarang, or tha...

@MartinHarper: Well, I'll be darned. Guess I've got a houserule, then. :) Commence cries of "The game is broken if you have to fix it!", but I prefer the interpretation that views the whole thing as unfolding all at once instead of enemies who politely wait while you make multiple throws. ...

@Psychic Robot: You are true about that. I don't focus my minions' fire like a laser on a single target. As I said in my blog, if I have bowminions, they're going to start by dividing their attacks between the two big guys who led the charge. That's pretty close to what everyone else here would do, ...

@Doom314: People might lawyer you on this, but with one reading* of the rules as written, you can veto using a single dagger for blinding barrage. I'll run you through my reasoning and we'll see if you agree or disagree. To make an area attack, you make attack rolls for each target. Each one is a se...

@Roy: No, monsters with bows don't break the game. That's a winnable scenario. It just breaks the assumption that a party that's all melee or all missile is better than one that mixes. Someone can say that an all archery ranger party would win that encounter. So what, when you make your all archery ...

@Murtak: Okay, I admit it: I assumed that your focus fire strategy must have worked in high level 3E play because if not I couldn't understand why you thought it was a good idea in 4E, since it seems to result in combats that grind, are unwinnable except with precisely formulated builds, and result ...

@MartinHarper: Not hardly hardly at all. Er. You know what I mean. A Wizard with Cloud of Daggers can kill a minion a round, but that's it. If there are four minions taking the place of a single monster in an encounter, the Wizard's going to spend four minions on clean-up duty, or you have everyone ...

@FatR: There are edge scenarios, though, in the game as written. If your strategy revolves around stunlocking, you're fucked by hyrdras, and there are hydras that go all the way up to the epic level. Sure, you can just use your Orb of Imposition power to kill them with a save ends ongoing damage pow...

clikmil: You want numbers? Okay, here's the numbers. These numbers were already part of the conversation, I figured they didn't need repeating. (A number between 4 to 12, representing a broad range of typical combats across levels) vs. (10 to 20, the number of rounds I hear as "typical" ar...

@Judging Eagle: Your "game" doesn't appeal to me even if I "win" it, so I'm not interested in your challenge. 3E is not 4E. We can agree on that, I'm sure. And one of the differences is that 4E moves away from "The Tactics of the Character Sheet" and puts the tactics on...

@Psychic Robot: Of course you can adjust encounters in 3E. You can do it in any roleplaying game. Again, human judgment is the difference between a DM and a server. Minions aren't dangerous? In our mid-heroic campaigns, bowman lackeys have proven to add quite a lot of danger to a combat. Four of the...

You guys like math. Here's math: You guys get more TPKs than are normal and take longer to win the fights that you do win. That's a simple greater than-less than situation. Explain to me how it is that you don't suck at playing 4E. Now explain to me how this is the system's problem. Playing rules as...

Oh, and a final note about minions: I've never heard anyone come up with a compelling reason why the party of seasoned fighters, savvy rogues, lerned wizards, and insightful clerics wouldn't know the less-trained rabble from the seasoned warriors among the monsters you're fighting, no "tag over...

I play a dagger rogue in one game. The virtue of daggers is you can throw them. I use magical Distance Daggers for extra range. The "all magical throwing weapons are returning" mechanic really increases a rogue's versatility after the opening levels. It lets me move around a lot, it means ...

@Murtak: Yeah, I read you guys saying that there are no tactics and you would love it if there were. And I also see you guys saying that a DM who has the NPCs act naturally for the situation with any given value of "the situation" other than "Dude, we're in your basement playing D&...

@Lago: I read things like "If the DM doesn't humor the players" and I can't believe that I haven't been lurking on two different forums for the past day, that it's not two different groups of people who are at one turn complaining about 4E's "anti-immersiveness" where they imagin...

@RandomCasualty2: Who wouldn't want to make a Dwarven Battlerager? The person who wants to play as an Elven one. I'm not going to say "NEVER LOOK AT THE MECHANICS", but this forum seems to have stared at them until they've gone mad. So much of the anti-4E grousing seems so contradictory to...