The Gaming Den

I, personally, would put a hard cap on all skills and make them obsolete after a certain level and I wasn't restricted by space concerns. If you want to do something fantastical after that point you need to use an appropriate power. There's no such thing as a balance check that lets you stand on wa...

I agree that it's a little bit too pat of a mechanic when applied universally and does undercut the seriousness of the situation. Because of this, it should be a mark of graduation to something better, about when you pass from the realm of mortal swordsman or undergraduate magician to 'someone who ...

Maybe I've just had a really weird and anomalous experience with this game. In 17 years of playing, I have yet to see a group of players not use part of their resources on "character development" stuff (hence why I don't see this problem). Not just that, I've seen it done at every single ...

Of course, you run into weird issues where it's dark out, so the scout gets a Perception penalty, which somehow makes it harder to hear the guy, or there's a lot of cover noise that somehow makes it harder to see the guy. In that situation, I think it would be judicious to either ignore the penalty...

The main drawback is that you have to write several hundred such entries and then edit to make sure that all of the potential critter-part craft goodies are level-appropriate. Another drawback is that you also have to write stuff up for enemies like "Elf", and "Halfling", and it...

Given that the Solution was "The No Self Buffs paradigm," what was the actual problem that prompted it? Was it simply that Self-buffing was considered overpowered? (I doubt it) Considering a lot of 4e design principles seem to boil down to "We saw Uber Build X on the CharOp boards bu...

The fact that Rope Trick survived through 3.5 means either: 1) Tweet et. al. explicitly wanted to legislate the 5-minute workday OR 2) They are really, really, really, really dumb. OR 3) The purpose of 3e was not to balance/change 2e, but rather to swap out the core mechanics of roll over or under/...

Not really that dissociative. You've got enough testosterone/adrenaline in you to rage out a certain number of times. Hell, that one literally is tiring afterwards. It's pretty strongly associative. You realize you can apply this logic to any daily martial maneuver right? You may use adrenaline to ...

I'd prefer a tatoo'd wizard. While I never saw a RPG based on the novel and for the live of me I'm drawing a blank on the name although I can describe the entire story line in minute detail, there was one race of wizards who basically tatooed the components of their spells on their bodies and by tr...

Really, I may be preaching to the choir by saying this, but the 4-encounter day is the stupidest thing ever. What was there plan exactly? That wizards would conserve spells, and spend half of every combat twiddling thumbs? Or that they would nova, and completely dominate two combats while they spen...

I had the opposite reaction to the SBG. It felt like a waste of time. Nobody was going to spend their money on strongholds instead of more magic items. The SBG would have made sense in 2E where you can't buy magic items at all, but so long as you can buy magic items, that's where your money is goin...

And what exactly is wrong with having a lot of longer encounters? I wouldn't personally expect to clear out a dungeon in one night. Maybe that's just another example of me playing the game drastically differently from how most people here do. But if we go through a dungeon and take 3-4 sessions, th...

also, from the perspective of a narrative, do you expect any real person to plan out their entire career from start to finish so they get the ideal set of life skills? or do you expect people to plan things out as they go because life's a series of events that can't usually be predicted in the long...

Oh, no doubt, that kind of thing is vital in making classes feel different enough; I just don't think that kind of granularity that you're proposing is necessary enough to justify the extra writing your system would need. If people really want that level of power choice then they can multiclass. I'...

Because you actually want powers to be flavorful. A Wave Motion Blast ability that lets Monks, Paladins, and Sorcerers pick it up is going to have to feel very generic, because otherwise you're going to have some weird dissonance to the power like monks wondering why they're suddenly channeling arc...

So the "class" becomes an extra, permanent, ability? Sounds workable. How would it work for single class characters? Good question. Giving each class one out-of-turn option and either one multiple-copies-in-the-table option or one use-something-you-didn't-roll option would ensure everyone...

I think you actually want to go further here. Say you're building a Swordmage, which is an Arcane Defender. You get your WoF entries from the Swordmage class list, which has a bunch of swording and teleportation moves on it. But you also get to pick up lists of powers from the Defender Sets - which...

The first one is that a lot of grognards are just mortally offended at the thought of fighters having powers period. No system is going to please them. Fuck 'em. The second one is that people who actually want fighters to have powers, like myself, are offended at how bullshit the powers are for the...

Disadvantages [/size] C) Should have players pick at least one 'physical' disadvantage, one 'personality' disadvantage, one 'history' disadvantage, and one 'luck' disadvantage. I'm not sure the idea of a "luck" disadvantage really makes sense here. Physical disadvantages are easy to come ...

I've seen several mentions in various threads here, most recently by Heironymous Rex in the "Saga's bad rep" thread, that AoOs are a bad idea and that WotC devs should have gotten rid of them by now, but haven't really seen anyone explain why. (My group doesn't really run AoOs by RAW due t...

On the subject of spells, has anyone done up a PDF like the Feat Bible for them? Collected all of the 3.5 spells in one place, I mean. If you're talking about the StormSeeker Feat Bible PDF, he/she/they also did a Class Bible (base classes, PrCs, racial progressions, and ACFs), an Item Bible (every...

2: You can solve of the setting problems with a timeskip. Fast forward 50 years, have the sorting hat replaced, and redefine the houses however you like. This. No need to even use Hogwarts, for that matter. I'd be inclined not to. There's never any mention of schools in a lot of areas, I'd be quite...

You want launch item from SpC; it's a cantrip that launches a touched item (up to Fine size and 10 lbs) out to any point in Medium range with no range penalties (and the attack roll doesn't matter anyway because you just need to drop it in a nearby square). A wand of launch item is only 375gp, so un...

Skill Points were a worse implementation than 2E AD&D Secondary Skills. Weird, but true. (4e's skill system had promise, but fucked everything up in a different way). If you don't mind explaining, exactly how did secondary skills/nonweapon proficiencies work? My AD&D group had already house...

As rules concepts go, Take 20 is an aberration. You simply don't see it before the 3e/d20 ruleset. (If you walked up to an AD&D table, say, and said "My thief has a 25% chance of picking locks, so he has a 100% chance of picking any lock in 2 minutes", you'd be laughed at. Hystericall...