The Gaming Den

The reason not to take gates is that gates can be defended. Planeshift and spelljammers can depart from and land anywhere on a plane, which means that you can get into or out of a plane even if Big Brother owns the gate room. Think about Stargate: up until the bad guys got starships, Earth's iris an...

Tables won't work because you'll potentially end up tracking different timers for everybody in the party. That would be annoying. Random cooldown dice might be a reasonable thing to use: every $time, everybody rolls some dice and if they hit their target number their body has fully aligned with the ...

Calling (Sp): as it gains levels, the Illithid Psi-Caller gains the ability to call creatures to its aid. Doing so is a Standard Action, and the creatures lurk around for one minute before vanishing back to their origins. It can use this ability once per hit die, total (not once per hit die for eac...

The ideas I'm seeing about elemental planes sound like they were remotely inspired by IGTN's Tome of Elements , which might be a good reference for the elemental sections of this project. For example, it had elemental sources and sinks that acted to keep the quantities of raw elements well-balanced,...

Iron Bones should cause a chance that the weapon then strikes another minion within a certain range, thus possibly setting off a chain of deathilarity that may well kill the pcs. Maybe. Edit: In fact you can use the thrown weapon miss rules (phb 158). Use the wielder's square as the "target,&q...

So anything that requires an property of reality to work - such as a predetermined future - can't work in a fictional game where that property doesn't exist (because of dice and players' ability to affect the plot). Are there any other properties of reality that imaginary games cannot replicate or ...

Huh? I said that there are limits on RPGs because there are limits on fiction. Are you claiming that there are more possible RPG plots than there are FICTION plots? That's crazy. I don't know the cardinalities of those sets, but I could reasonably believe that RPG plots aren't a strict subset of fi...

If Magical Tea party is an RPG, then anything is possible. It's not true that "anything is possible", because fiction itself has limits. Let me try to rephrase the essence Frank's comment in terms I would agree with: [*]There is a maximum number of amazing coincidences that you can put in...

You can't do the classic hero myth. This means that one person can't have some special power that makes him better than other people who are expected to go on adventures with him. This means that stories like Harry Potter where he is a wizard who is better than other wizards he adventures with just...

And it's even a fairly reasonable thing to do if you're producing content independently. I write a little bit of open-source code. Occasionally people will try it out and then write about it on their blogs or on twitter or similar, sometimes including complaints or suggestions that they felt didn't...

I'll save you some time. There's no mathematical operation you can perform on a finite set that will let you map it one to one with an infinite set. You would need to start with an infinite number of clerics if you want to cast an infinite number of spells. You can take an infinite number of non-ac...

...You Lost Me wrote:I recommend making it more explicit

nudge nudge wink wink

Need to work the chicken-and-egg question in there somewhere. Not sure how. Some kind of mind-affecting confusion attack, maybe a trap, maybe some kind of lockdown ability that works by imposing a circular dependency on an attacker's actions.

Area spells are limited to being their Force in meters of Radius. Ok, yeah, that's stupid. That really should have defined that in terms of mass or volume rather than radius. The thing about the dam instead of the casters though is that at least your dam can hardly get fed up with life and walk awa...

Hell, it even outright says that it only moves "loose" material, and if the material is connected to anything that you have to spend many seconds wriggling it free before it'll move at all. The spell that I've managed to find (Street Magic 174) could cause solid steel to wiggle free from ...

While you could use Shape Metal to spin the turbine directly, pushing it at 1/3 of a m/s is so bullshit that the amount of power you're getting is essentially meaningless. Lifting and dropping stuff is being conservative. The Shape spells simply set a material's velocity and include no language abo...

Well, looking at it, Shape Material can produce an decent amount of power. The amount of material is based on volume which is measured in cubic meters, which is an incredible amount of mass. Presuming you choose a roughly fluidic material, you're moving many tons of the stuff at the low end. I don'...

Every single paladin in the world falls the instant they take their first level. I forget, what intrinsically makes them fall? Nonsensical definitions of the law and chaos alignments mean that it would be impossible for a paladin to adhere to a literal interpretation of their code of conduct. Or, m...

Every single piece of wood in the entire civilization started out as ten-foot-long one-inch-by-one-inch planks because they exploit the loop between the prices of ladders and ten-foot-poles to make all their lumber. The same goes for all their metal (maybe a cycle between breastplates and full plate...

Contagious Paralysis : If something touches someone you paralyzed with an attack (so no stacking this to hold person), they have to save versus paralysis. Sounds like it could be hilarious in the right hands. It is. I played a wizard that decided to stay on par with the rest of the party by dumping...

And whatever you write on your character sheet, that's who you get if a time portal opens up and your future self steps out. Huh, that is well done. Simultaneously hits all of "give players enough control", "downstream PCs are not the player characters", and "players willin...

Oh, Ghremdal indirectly reminded me of another Grandfather Paradox Resolution Mechanic. [*] You have the right to remain consistent : Like "Denied" or "Causality Bomb", but instead of the failures and explosions being improbable and random, there's some entity or agency that's ac...

You don't need many-worlds to do this, and the many-worlds interpretation is not any more supported by observation than the Copenhagen interpretation. Fair enough. :tongue: I do find, though, that MWI is much more useful for time travel discussions, particularly when you're trying to put together e...

A wacky combination of "Denied" and "You Already Did That" is how the universe seems to behave in reality. The universe is maintaining a superposition of all possible states which are internally consistent, running them in parallel, and discarding anything it finds which is incon...

One of my groups had a git repository filled with org-mode documents. Best-organized campaign I've ever been a part of; the DM went nuts trying to keep us from figuring out what was going on without "cheating". Probably not very useful advice for you, though, since it doesn't work unless t...