The Gaming Den

I would like to point out that sometimes extra verbosity makes things easier to read; there is such a thing as excessive terseness. When I started reading/writing math papers I noticed that there was a lot of filler text that really wasn't necessary, and figured I should cut that out. The first time...

You know, I was always under the impression that the purpose of the Ur-priest class was really stupid cheese builds...

kzt: if you do an EFT in dollars you transfer dollars, usually. At least for large sums you need to explicitly ask the bank to do the transfer in whatever currency you want it to happen in. But of course banks can do that easily. Frank: that's because Canadian Dollars are also dollars. I think the w...

They are in most of North America, I think. Also "$" is an abbreviation for the IMF currency, but it's not pronounced "dollars."

I think the idea was to build a real diplomacy system, which would include reaction rolls. You're right that just sticking a gratuitous reaction roll on the current system causes as many problems as it solves, but I think everyone's been taking for granted that the 3.x diplomacy system sucks.

Factotum--as far as I can tell--is really good in gestalt builds (as silly as gestalt is in the first place). Because the big advantage of the Factotum is that he gets (some number of) extra actions. And the big disadvantage is that he doesn't have much to do with those actions. So if you gestalt hi...

I get the impression that RoW fixed the same problem twice, and so overfixed it. They take the fighter, which is boring because all he does is get combat feats, which are total crap, and give him a whole bunch of extra interesting mechanics. And that's awesome, because now he has cool stuff to do al...

echo: you're right that spells don't have to be trivial. So there are two solutions to the problem I outlined. You can give fighters and rogues and everyone else powers as big as wizards' and clerics', or you can scale down clerics and wizards to match what you're comfortable giving to fighters and ...

Bonds are tricky because interest rates make their values fluctuate. But then, interest rates also make the value of currency fluctuate, so it's at least conceptually possible that that's not that big a deal. Certainly, it's totally plausible that a megacorp is at least as credible as a minor nation...

echoVanguard: I don't think Spiderman can reasonably be described as an "epic character." But climbing up a storm-wracked cliff is still a trivial challenge for him. More generally, there's a huge vocabulary confusion going on in this thread, which you're giving a great example of here. Yo...

Can I point out that as set up, the reaction roll probably wouldn't apply to the climactic showdown with the BBEG anyway? Because the idea of the reaction roll is to see how someone reacts when he doesn't already have a specific opinion of the PCs. So if the PCs bump into the BBEG in the third encou...

Yeah, Catharz and Vebyast have it right. If you can solve any NP-complete problem you can solve every NP-complete problem, and every other NP-class problem. And if you can solve every NP-complete problem you can solve the specific NP problem of "crack this encryption scheme which is theoretical...

The only thing I disagree with in all of that, Frank, is that I think distributing one-time pads is way easier than you think it is; that in practice it wouldn't be harder than EUE, because you'd reset keys more often for "what if it's been compromised" reasons than you'd run out your one-...

Grek, Vebyast is right. I know it seems intuitively like what you're describing should work, but it actually doesn't--things like Kolmogorov complexity give us the formalism to prove that that actually can't possibly work. Petabyte one-time pads are always a thing--one-time pads aren't as hard to ge...

K: monolatrous, actually, which is similar but different in a couple of important ways. The early Israelites were monolatrous. They didn't say Baal didn't exist; they said he was an asshole, and his worshippers were assholes too, and their god was bigger and better anyway. Elijah's praying contest w...

Oops. This is why I tried to weigh in early, to keep a lot of actively false things from showing up. Looks like I failed; sorry. 1) Quantum computers do not necessarily have the ability to solve NP-complete problems. Best guess right now is that they don't. It's not known either way, though, so we c...

It's unbreakable if you have no way of knowing whether you've gotten the actual message back out. Like, with a one-time pad we have no information about the message other than maximum length, because it could be literally anything that length or shorter. With a secret key we can start weeding out me...

Sorry, I meant that you should replace EUE with something that isn't "effectively unbreakable, but that is actually literally unbreakable. Because if the encryption is theoretically breakable and you can solve NP-hard problems then it's also breakable in practice. But if you say that no amount ...

Since this is related to what I do, I'll chime in here a bit. (Yes, go ahead and ignore this for game balance purposes if necessary, but figured I'd throw it out there anyway). From an actual theoretical perspective, the key question for future cryptography is whether we can solve NP-complete proble...

We've effectively played D&D without in-combat clerical healing for years, in 2E and in 3E. One does need to adjust stuff, especially some monsters, but it worked. Frank and I were players in Red Hand of Doom where clerical healing was out. As Shadowrun players, we just played DnD like Shadowru...

Lokathor: I think those questions don't actually interact with the magic system the way it's supposed to be set up. You can teleport anything you can target to anywhere within X meters of it, where X is some number fixed by the system I don't know. I think Frank is killing line of sight as the deter...

Whether you need a link to the object, the destination, neither, or both does change something . But none of those permutations are either necessary or sufficient to block interplanetary teleportation. And the measure that you have implicitly proposed to stop interplanetary teleportation is compati...

Vebyast raises a good point (and if he's right, I was wrong before and I didn't actually understand what Frank was saying). Manxome, it's not exactly the same. Because the magic system is very clear about what a legal target is. There's a few conditions that'll let you target something: if you touch...

I understand the point Frank is trying to make (now; I didn't the first time). Which is that if teleport is written as "target creature/object is transported to target location" you have to write in a special exception that the two targets have to be close by--and this contradicts the rest...

Endovior: the great thing, though, is that every one of those caveats sounds like a good thing. Not for the people using the qbits, but for the game design. Because you've just outlined like three different types of missions characters might want to go on.