The Gaming Den

Well, that's all good, then. On topic , that said, I think the whole highs and lows thing should as much as possible be a result of the RNG, not major choices the players have made, though it's perfectly reasonable for players to have different talents and throw obstacles in their paths that spotlig...

Wait, what? How does a level-based encounter system that balances things on a CR/EL paradigm solve the problem of "in order for your choices to be meaningful, sometimes you have to benefit from them and sometimes they have to be unhelpful/detrimental?" Balancing encounters the way 3.5e doe...

The last PC can more or less seriously just be a druid.

4E seems like the closest to LotR of all the editions. This deserves further explanation. Is it like LotR... ...because of the stories it's intended to model? ...because spellcasters don't have the power to reshape planes with their magic? ...because it's kind of low-power in general compared to 3....

Implement users are also inherently behind because they suffer all the drawbacks of element abuse, while getting few to none of the upsides. Any ranger can abuse any element feat by simply wielding a bastard sword of the proper element. What's funny is that custserv can't make up their mind on this...

Well see, that would require that people wouldn't automaticly cry that a caster who tosses around two d12's with an at will, hits from 20 yards away, crits on an 18, and gets an extra d8+ of damage on top of all that was the most over powered and broken thing ever. That's an interesting inversion. ...

The answer is "maybe." If the game is truly focused on gadgeteering, then you should break it up into multiple abilities. Each branch of gadgeteering that you include should be its own skill and include proficiency with gadgets under that umbrella. If Laser Doohickeys is one proficiency an...

See, though, it doesn't matter that a party "can" beat an encouter 5 CRs above their ECL. By the book, that kind of encounter is supposed to be overwhelmingly difficult, and according to the DMG, the PCs "will almost certainly lose" if they die, so they should flee rather than fi...

A riding dog is not the same monster as a giant legendary titanic wolf the size of an elephant. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you were saying earlier is that no matter what level James Bond is, a guard dog should be a threat. They are the same rottweilers on chains, it's just that for some reaso...

James Bond, no matter what his level, still has to get past guards and dogs. I wouldn't go so far as Frank and say this is "insulting," but it is really weird . If you're playing Secret Agents and you even have a level system where your characters' power is supposed to scale up over time,...

Did anyone else play way too much Realmz? I played through the default City of Bywater module in limited shareware mode like ten times for some reason, levelling dozens of characters to the cap of 7 and wondering what the game would be like if I could just get a registered copy when I was a kid wit...

Surgo wrote:What he meant is that you'd soon be a corpse, which is an animate object.

Quoted for posterity--and truth, considering the popularity of necromancy around here.

You're not an inanimate object, you're paralyzed. Having a 0 is not the same as a non-ability.

Otherwise a lot of people would just dip one level to get fast healing.

I've tried to search TGD with a couple different query phrasings, and I'm not having any luck locating this "game design flowchart."

Can someone point me in the right direction? I'm very interested in taking a look at it.

The demand for a functional set of rules to do "roleplaying stuff" is actually very high. This makes me wonder what kind of design goals the 4e designers are setting for the skill challenge system. I can't for the life of me figure them out. It seems like the idea is to make skills more v...

Furthermore, it's not logical because the definition of limited changes depending upon who you talk to. ...(rest of post goes here)... You could've chosen a 'logical' argument for something else, but nooo. You chose the one thing that you can't get any teabaggers to agree on. I just wanted to stick...

DMs get a bad rap on TGD--or, I should say, there's a tendency to talk about the crappy ones more than the good ones, probably because venting is cathartic. (Crissa, in particular, seems to have terrible luck with DMs.) So what makes a good DM? Obviously, a good DM runs an entertaining game, whateve...

Well, technically, you can do most of those things in 4e. You can ready/hold actions, you can bull rush, you can grapple, if you have a mount you can choose whether you want to attack or if you want the mount to do it (not quite overrun, but whatever), et cetera. I'm not entirely sure what J_E's com...

It is totally design intent that players get hosed for selling items because the game doesn't want players to pick their own items. Actually, I think it's a little more convoluted than that, seeing as how the treasure parcel system explicitly tells DMs that they should ask players for "wishlis...

What does this have to do with Pathfinder? Illustration of their design mentality and understanding of the game? If you think polar ray is a good spell, you clearly don't understand D&D. If you think a player should be charged actual character resources to change a spell that normally deals col...

Kaelik, how exactly is that suggestion even vaguely sticking to the "warrior" archetype Hicks was looking for?

It's a Warmage who is somehow less versatile. And all bad saves? What for?

It also means the warriors can mow down 2 enemies a round, forever, whilst the mage can do so once or twice a day. Whilst i like the idea that a Mage is more versatile but has to use spell slots to be the equal of the warriors in combat, it sounds like it could be pretty unbalanced. This isn't real...

Unless, of course, all of your adversaries are sandbagging somehow. Which seems to be an implied assumption at times, even cutting out the fact that the DM is theoretically all-powerful.