The Gaming Den

I mean, is a Fear spell substantially different from an illusion designed to route a group of enemies, through fear? Is an illusionary wall designed to hide an entrance substantially different from a wall of stone spell? Is an illusion monster different from a summoned monster? ...obviously yes? A ...

However, you can make Wild Shape into a spell, and then have it not on the class list and instead activated with nature points or whatever, like there's spells on the domain lists that aren't on any class lists. Even Smite Evil and Turn Undead could be written as spells in the spell section and onl...

My various D&D questions have started coalescing into my own D&D heartbreaker, and I'm thinking about combining some classes that share sufficient conceptual space, like, say, making Cleric and Druid different archetypes of a single Acolyte class. Wildshape could easily just be a 3rd level ...

A guy in my game group wants to run Star Wars Saga edition. I was going to search through threads here and maybe ask some optimization questions, but after perusing the rules I honestly am having trouble giving two shits about it. It just seems like someone's awkward d20 kludge where they nerf ever...

Commercially speaking this will be a terrible idea, as a significant portion of D&D's fanbase will complain loud enough to make Mearls do an errata. Or do what he did to 4e, which was axe it entirely and pretend it doesn't exist. People will completely accept an edition where Fighters get nice ...

Seems to me there are basically four axes you can vary for this: 1) How many classes you have (small fixed set vs. gradually-increasing medium number vs. classplosion). 2) How much customization there is for each class (no subclassing/archetypes/etc. vs. customization within the class theme vs. cust...

I could see a circle of 8/balance being nominally ok if they’re that way for a good reason. Like they’re all needed to fend off eldritch horrors. Need someone powerful enough to call on and command each plane for armies come reckoning day, so cannot wipe out your chaotic evil gods since you will ne...

There are enough weird ass declarations about metals and alloys in AD&D (electrum pieces, for example), that I'm pretty sure this is all coming from a place of total ignorance. Is the weirdness you're referring to the fact that electrum coins existed at all when they weren't really a thing by t...

I like it. The biggest pitfall I can see is that by collecting lots of polities people might end up "double-counting" some bonuses. Like, if rural goblins got extra population in hills, while rural dwarves generate valuable beer on hills, then if farms go on hexes, you have to divide up y...

Nothing in the Realms is like that, the events that changed things are centuries old and the modules produce almost no effect on anything, other than to suggest changes made centuries ago might be being undone! Every edition advanced the FR timeline--1e to 2e is a 10-year jump (1358 to 1368 DR), an...

It's not just that level dips are similar to taking big chunky feats, open multiclassing via feats is already kinda sorta something you can do in 3e, depending on what class(es) you want to multiclass into. The later books went out of their way to let you pick up a handful of abilities from their su...

They definitely don't exist on Krynn, since psionics were definitely not a thing in Dragonlance. Also because Gem Dragons originated in an early Dragon Magazine issue and it's entirely possible that Weis and Hickman didn't know about them when coming up with the setting, and even if they had seen th...

Planescape is easily the worst and stupidest setting for D&D. The great wheel has always been the worst part of D&D and planescape doubles down it. The setting would be lost to fucking history if sliders had not come out within 12 months of it being published. Alternate theory, the setting ...

You know, I always sort of liked the idea of fantasy worlds that have dangerous areas that are inimical to life because the elements are literally linked to otherworldly places that become coterminous with the physical plane when conditions are right and thus creatures from those otherworldly place...

I always optimize my NPCs for the purpose they're going to serve, but that purpose isn't going to be the same kind of purpose that a PC serves, and not just in the "going to live for a campaign vs. one or two combats" sense. Let's say I'm building a 3e NPC as a battlefield control caster t...

A combinatoric explosion of powers is pretty neat for character customization, but bad for tactical variety. Take Fireball and Lightning Bolt for example (pretending for a moment that they do good damage). When fighting normal or electricity-immune enemies, you toss out fireballs, putting your sphe...

Would problems like incredibly specific feats like that be as big of an issue if there was an in-game way of getting them outside of your normal leveling scheme? I guess it comes down to the implementation? I know how hard it can be to formalize that kind of advancement. I instituted a downtime tra...

Don't think you need 1000 discreet actions, maybe a dozen that can stack for over a thousand combinations. Reading 1000 actions is kind of increasing the spellbook problem, if I am interpreting you correctly. The 4e choice to have only 8 classes was inexcusable, but those classes also didn't need t...

I've run two "party of monsters" games in 3e using different approaches. In the first, I hadn't intended to run a monstrous game, but ended up giving the entire party a free +8 worth of LA (for reasons that are largely irrelevant for this thread) and having the party refluff themselves int...

Regarding calling, my group tends to fall into the overanalysis trap and discuss bunches of different plans with lots of minor variations when given enough prep time to deal with something, so I've definitely run into the "We do that!" "You do what , exactly?" problem mentioned i...

Using the EU as an argument probably won't end very well. That was written by someone trying to fill in the potholes (plotholes?) that Lucas accidentally made. Well, there's EU stuff and then there's EU stuff. There are definitely books/series/games out there that come out later and try to retcon o...

The easiest hack to make good gods "work" for the most part is to say that they are losing. You can make up whatever reason you want but if there are forces of evil and forces of good the good has to be losing if the game is about fighting all the evil in the land. If good is winning or h...

Less tasteful than when Finn plows Poe on top of the x-wing but I understand the story called for it. If that were actually in the movie, that'd probably be the one thing that could ever make me sit through one of the sequel trilogy movies again. I'll keep my fingers crossed that it makes the direc...

The numbers don't work out. 2 million troops, even heavily mechanized, is not enough to pacify even a single major continent on planet Earth. The Republic has thousands of planets. One million, nay, even hundreds of thousands, is still a tiny amount for national armies. Let alone planetary. Let alo...

I think Emerald is mostly right, but I think it's important to keep in mind that the mythology that most of the writers are familiar with (Norse, Greek/Roman) involves gods being dicks because they weren't supposed to be good or evil. If you import Zeus into your game, you have to give him an align...