The Gaming Den

I started playing AD&D because it was the first RPG I was introduced to--started playing a game of 2e run by a friend's dad when I was 8, gave 1e a try after a year or so, then 3e came out and we added that to our rotation, then around when 3.5 came out my group switched to 3e exclusively. I've ...

Of the things on your list, I think Major Industries, Demitype Percentages, and Legal System would be most relevant to PCs--what does this place make that I can buy/steal/tweak/infiltrate/etc., how much will my pointy ears and green skin stand out in a crowd if I need to go to ground, and who do I b...

Even Mythic heroes die when you drop a mountain on them. In D&D you take 10D6. Technically, if by "mountain" you mean a 1-ton slab of rock, you actually take at minimum 11d6 (10d6 for weight, 1d6 for distance), each additional ton adding 10d6 damage, and an actual mountain would conta...

OH, so this is just how the sample towns in the DMG were set up... having nothing to do then with how the game is actually played using your own world. There are no sample towns in the DMG. There's a chart of community sizes, from Thorp with a population of 20-80 to Metropolis at a population of ov...

PR, this isn't your usual trolling, instead you are talking like a certifiable loony here - has shadzar or condorDM or darwinism hijacked your account? Lemme refresh your memory: In 2e an 8 Strength and a 15 Strength only differ by encumberance numbers and changing BBLG from 1% to 7% (both of which...

God, I miss the days in which you were allowed to call out things like the Dresden Files and Eragon and Exalted and Komodo no Todoke and PokeGirls on their bullshit. I've seen rants on Eragon and Exalted and haven't heard of most of the others, but I haven't seen a good rant on the Dresden Files. W...

Requiring the targets to be within a 10 foot radius is just adding complexity for complexity's sake, as far as I can tell. It doesn't always make much sense, but it does add interesting tactical decisions. If an enemy moves outside your buddy's Kill The Bad Guys aura, you can either leave the aura ...

However I wonder about stuff like the Paladin Aura of Courage "Each ally within 10 feet of her gains a +4 morale bonus on saving throws against fear effects. " - while this is technically always on for the paladin, it can swtich on and off multiple times during a combat for her allies. Is...

Ok cool, could you re-explain the second step? I think that is the one I am having trouble understanding. Sure. Breaking it down into substeps: 2a) Start with the base casting table for a given class, in this case the cleric. Lvl 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1st 3 2 — — — — — — — — 2nd 4 3 — — — — — — — — 3...

What does it actually do other than leave casters with less spells per day? How does it help multiclassed characters? It leaves single-class casters with the same number of spells per day and multi-class casters with slightly fewer spells than a primary caster. Multi-class casters are still asstast...

Dominicius wrote:I don't understand this system....

What in particular is confusing about it?

A fighter got an army of 0th level dudes, that the wizard could pretty easily destroy by casting Death Spell or a few Fireballs. I always find it interesting how these discussions always revert into balancing some hypothetical D&D: Mortal Kombat game in which the PCs are dueling with each other...

I suspect that time spent around undead probably involves catching weird flesh-eating diseases, something DnD handwaves away. Well, first, all of the negative energy infusing undead bodies probably wipes out germs and viruses and such just as much as it harms larger lifeforms, and second, if you ha...

I like the idea of peeling off the extra spell slots, that's a nice touch. However, it disproportionately benefits wizards, which is less than ideal. Under this system I'd force all wizards to specialize and then allow spells to be reduced to zero (so a specialist wizard would get 0+1 spells when t...

You don't seem to have fixed either of those problems? I mean, sure, if I'm playing someone who isn't a Cleric, Druid, or Wizard, I can stop that and take high level spells later on in life instead, and everyone can cast Black Tentacles and Heal, but I can't ever stop taking caster levels because t...

Multiclassing sucks for a caster in 3e, because you fall behind in spell levels and nothing is really worth the loss of spell levels; designing caster PrCs is hard because most casters don't have much to give up outside of spell levels, which is a bad idea. The following is an idea to hopefully fix ...

The whole “team” system is BS. Alignment basically describes how an individual stacks up to an absolute externally framed reference system. There is as much a “team good” as there is a “team left handed.” A creature may be “good” and he may be “left handed.” There are practical reasons why good peo...

In order to be True Neutral, you'd have to recognize Good as good and Evil as evil and for some reason actively desire neither. [...] So now all the world is "evil" and Nirvana (or whatever you do to get to it) is "good." There is no third moral entity. Considering in D&D yo...

Fighters: I do agree that the definition of Fighter is "he who sucks a lot on High-level D&D". I still propose the simple solution: Make ToB classes standard (with some polish of course), nerf Wizards. Really, is a simple problem with a simple solution. Also, haters of that book tend ...

I think that preserving the whole extra-layer-of-defense AC/miss chance distinction is incompatable with your stated goal of making miss chances faster to resolve and simpler to work with. The d% roll is already barebones. It's basically just a weighted coin flip; there are no modifiers or anything...

Replace cover with a flat AC bonus, if you just want to speed it up. Same with concealment. I'd make them overlap, not stack. Offhand, hand out +2, +4, +8 for 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 cover or concealment. if it's a flat miss chance, either decide it's basically cover or concealment (like blur) and round ...

But that doesn't mean you don't want to go with one of the first two options, depending on the results you want. Among other things, if you're a summoner, option 1 is great for you--your mooks ignore miss chances completely and you're still protected from boss monsters. Part of the reason I wanted ...

What does someone with an attack bonus of 5 hitting someone with AC 15 and concealment 7 look like? 10% normal hits, 5% crits and 85% misses? Yep. That person needs a 10 or more to hit. Using the original proposal (concealment 7 = 7 and below miss), that's 45% misses, 55% hits, since the character ...

My big concern with these is that concealment and miss chances are now completely useless against weaker monsters. So if something hits you on a 2, then concealment 10 is pretty good; but if something only hits you on an 11+, concealment is absolutely and totally useless. This is mechanically weird...

A friend of mine will be running a mid-level Underdark-focused game starting in a week or so, and because of the expected prevalence of spell resistance and concealment (all of the PCs and many of the enemies will be drow, and he's adding blur to the list of drow racial SLAs) he was thinking of hous...