The Gaming Den

But real people really do ignore genuine opportunities to improve on their current lot, all the time. They refuse to leave their job for a better-paying one or one that carries a promotion. They don't divorce their spouse for one younger and better-looking. They don't commit crimes they certainly wo...

1152523363[/unixtime]][br]The masses are such because they are destined never to rise above thier station, otherwise every third farmer would be a retired fourth level Fighter. [br][br]This is where I think you go astray. Equality of opportunity is not the same thing as equality of outcome. I see n...

Frank may have been thinking of the Balor (which also has Blasphemy at will as an SLA, but at caster level 20th).

Hilariously, the SRD presents Blasphemy as an example of a tactic the Balor uses if it doesn't feel seriously threatened. Yeah, um. Okay.

--d.

Uses/day is indeed a terrible mechanic. Indeed, depending on circumstances, 1/day may in fact be indistinguishable from "at will" -- or it may be radically different. There's just no way to tell except through actual play whether the DM will let you rest after every encounter or will never...

Better feats. This nonsense of selecting, essentially, the same feat 4 different times (two-weapon fighting, improved two-weapon fighting, greater two-weapon fighting, whatever the fourth one is) so that it continues to keep up with your BAB progression is absurd.[br][br]What's worse, it's actually ...

In fairness, I think the granularity of the action system is partly the problem here. Technically, we can't swing a sword while running without buying Spring Attack, so it's no surprise we can't cast a spell while walking, either. We can move and then cast a spell, though, which my mind sometimes in...

Since before third edition, in fact. Using Stoneskin that way was a common (and effective) tactic in some of the BioWare computer games.

--d.

Did you mean [br][counturl=40]this thread[/counturl], Crissa?[br][br]For what it's worth, I was thinking of:[br][br]The Josh Kablack Maneuver: having Small spellcasters cast Reduce Person in order to ride around on their own familiars and hence obtain combat flight at level 1.[br][br]The Lago Syllog...

No, not this year. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad one, since I can be painfully shy in large groups of strangers and have a nasty tendency to just sort of stand around, fade into the background, and then feel horribly depressed for the next few days. :)[br][br]But maybe next year![br][...

Let's see ...[br][br]Mirror of Life Trapping: 200k for a fancy death effect with a built-in Speak With Dead, all in a fragile, breakable package that pretty much can't be carried around with you? Uh, I'll pass, I think.[br][br]Cubic Gate: All I'm saying is, an Amulet of the Planes costs 44,000 gold ...

I like the prestige classes very much, in particular the EWoB (though I keep wanting to drop the "the" and add a comma). I would presume it's there not so much to be actually played (although it's kind of neat) as to serve as an object lesson to DMs on how they can, and should, be tailorin...

Protection from Evil is a great spell when you're fighting Vampires or Enchanters or whatever. But it's a first level spell, even for Paladins; so it's not that much of a trial to get the Cleric to memorize it instead, and it's even less of a trial to just get a non-spell completion item of it made....

Yeah, you still have the ability to cast the spells, but you don't realize you can. [br][br]It's like any action movie you've ever seen where amnesia is involved -- Jason Bourne's hanging out on a park bench in Germany somewhere and has no idea that he's really a total badass. Now, when a couple of ...

I may be crazy, but I am coming to the conclusion that my excluded schools will be Enchantment and ... Abjuration. Yes, Abjuration.[br][br]It's true, I'm missing out on Dispel Magic, Shield, Energy Immunity, and so on. But look at it this way:[br][br]* Nearly all of the good Abjuration spells are al...

It is less of a problem, definitely. The mounted-warrior type Knight having to fight without his horse is like the Cleric having to fight in an anti-magic field -- he can still do stuff, he just can't do as well. That's okay, as long as over the course of the campaign, the number of fights that happ...

Yes, but we need to be super-careful with fighting styles like "mounted combat" where the ability to use the style is heavily dependent on environmental factors -- it would suck to have the Knight end up wearing the clown suit for a whole story arc because the DM wanted to run "Descen...

If people are getting to make choices at all, they probably ought to be meaningful choices. So the answer is either "no, they don't get to pick up a new style" or "yes, they do, and it's good", unless the difference between the styles is so extreme that sometimes having a really ...

I think of a Monk as a very specific kind of Swashbuckler, actually. Well, sort of. There are basically two kinds of Monk concept based on the source material:[br][br]1> The Martial Arts Master. This is a guy who fights unarmored (or very lightly armored) with either bare hands or some sort of bizar...

Right then, finally getting back to this.[br][br]I'm leaning very strongly toward starting human, rather than elf, mainly because I want those extra points of constitution, and the extra feat more or less evens it out anyhow in terms of getting a weapon proficiency. Also, I loathe elves.[br][br]Whic...

Do they have to be damaging rays, or can they do other wacky stuff as long as they're rays and hit as ranged touch attacks? You didn't really specify in the initial post ...

--d.

While these are excellent tactics for use on GMs of a logical, thoughtful bent when it comes to the rules, the fact that your GM is getting on you for wanting to play a paladin/sorcerer hints at the sort of GM who feels that anything more complicated than he or she personally would create is "p...

Yet again I have to agree and disagree ... but this time I mostly have to disagree. Tolkien's hobbits most certainly do exceed their limits ... in the sense of what they thought they were capable of doing before their adventures began. In terms of exceeding human limits (or in this case, hobbit limi...

Hobbits do indeed save the world, but, as is often the case in Tolkien, they save it in their own racially deterministic way. A hobbit hero is tough, persistent, stubborn, cheerful in the face of certain doom, and possessed of astonishing willpower. But he isn't a master swordsman -- that's for Nume...

The idea of "the Chosen One" is a repeated -- sort of beaten to death, actually -- theme in source literature, so I'm not surprised that it keeps recurring in games. Looking at my bookshelf:[br][br] Call of Cthulu is about totally ordinary people who struggle against cosmic evil for (gener...

Book, could you talk in a little more detail about the type of builds you're accustomed to seeing? I'm curious as to what it was about them that tended to make them less survivable -- lack of hit points, lack of AC, et cet. The buffhappy nature of a lot of fighter/mage (and, for that matter, cleric)...