The Gaming Den

Chamomile: I don't think he's getting it confused at all. In rough outline (hey, I only lived in England for a year) the bowler bowls a ball at the batsman, and the batsman (among other things) needs to make sure that the ball doesn't hit the wicket he's standing in front of. If it does hit the wic...

Chamomile: I don't think he's getting it confused at all. In rough outline (hey, I only lived in England for a year) the bowler bowls a ball at the batsman, and the batsman (among other things) needs to make sure that the ball doesn't hit the wicket he's standing in front of. If it does hit the wick...

Well, nothing's ever going to replicate the original chances exactly--you just don't have the same curve of results with 1d20 that you do with 2d20. The question is what you want to do. The original setup means concealment is useful against enemies with high attack bonuses. So max concealment is rea...

Kaelik: I think you're overcomplicating it. I see no evidence that the gem needs to be that expensive before you bind the soul into it. So your (1) is silly. And given the scroll rules it seems like a scroll of trap the soul or whatever should be purchasable with gold, so you can do that in the pure...

My big concern with these is that concealment and miss chances are now completely useless against weaker monsters. So if something hits you on a 2, then concealment 10 is pretty good; but if something only hits you on an 11+, concealment is absolutely and totally useless. This is mechanically weird,...

If you have the power to survive selling a wish economy item for gold, you don't need the gold it would give you because you are in the wish economy yourself. this is actually the inverse of my last point ... the fact that the wish economy can be entered by simply throwing gold at it definitionally...

D&D has less of an agency problem. As in, the Soviet Union had the power to collect nukes, and mid-level security officers were selling them out from under the Soviet Union's nose (Or its carcass). And that works because the Soviet Union was a massive country that had millions of people exercisi...

As an example: one of the Might and Magic games starts with the PCs getting a castle. Like, that's the first thing that happens. Basically the whole plot is driven by the fact that the PCs get a huge castle at like level 2. In RAW D&D 3.x you can't do that, because the level 2 PCs will sell the...

The "magic to fight global warming" thing could work. The point of the hydrogen bomb comment, I think, is to suggest that, say, the US had basically all its magicians working on a way to fix climate change. But they didn't tell anyone. And then Russia and China noticed that some group of m...

* There's nothing wrong with allowing for the same currency to purchase cheap and expensive things; by definition, the Wish "economy" allows that too (ie. something could cost 1 super-gold piece or 1000 super-gold pieces, presumably ). The specific complaint that I've heard is that cartin...

Right. But the souls are planar currency only if they're expensive enough that you can't wish for them (which means, what, CR four or above, something like that?). And while you can wish up the gems, you have to actually go collect the souls. Which is, presumably, a thing you can do. You can go kill...

This isn't RPG nerdy precisely, but if you want the seriously nerdy, min/max, numbers oriented approach, check out the Hacker's Diet: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html Comes with a whole suite of Excel spreadsheets to make dieting easier. (No personal experience--I'm one of those lu...

PL: your last paragraph is basically what I was trying to say. I'd like to see a system with both elements in it, but I don't think that matches the "get a simple system up now" requirements of this post.

PL: honestly, I think the two systems actually complement each other; I'm just worried that insofar as designing something like this is complicated , adding in a second not-really-tested system makes it even more complicated. I think the vague positioning rules work well with winds of fate flavor-wi...

I'll throw out that I sort of like the idea of combining Frank's six-zone system for battlefield layouts with Winds of Fate. Might involve too many different pieces for this sort of proof-of-concept design, though.

As far as I can tell, the big disconnect between you and Frank/DS/Lago is that you assume that each round you can discard 2/3 of your powers without thinking about them much. Frank's goal is, explicitly, to get you not to do that, and to think about whether there's a way to make the single-target F...

Mean_liar, as much as Frank's talking like an asshole--and really, what do you expect?--he does sort of have a point. You said that you feel like six choices isn't enough to keep you interested "because you want to be flummoxed". Frank's entire goal is to give you a bunch of options in a ...

Mean_liar, as much as Frank's talking like an asshole--and really, what do you expect?--he does sort of have a point. You said that you feel like six choices isn't enough to keep you interested "because you want to be flummoxed". Frank's entire goal is to give you a bunch of options in a w...

Koumei, that sounds about right. So if you look at the thread on at-will systems, Frank said this: I think it's important to note that the reason why movespam doesn't get extremely old for those characters in 3e D&D is because combat is extremely short. If the players were confronted with combat...

Frank: no matter what I roll, will there be a "Win now" result I can pick? To stick with the 3.5 comparison, is it possible that 1 will give me Hold Monster, 2 will give me Deep Slumber, 3 will give me Charm Monster, 4 will give me Forcecage, 5 will give me Acid Fog and 6 will give me Pow...

Note that morality includes modesty and immorality basically means you are deficient or have an excess in an otherwise moral trait. So, both prudishness and lustiness could be considered immoral, while a modest mean between the two is moral. Funny, I was expecting something more christian, but it's...

For that matter, in the original book Dracula could just wander around in the sunlight no problem. He couldn't use a bunch of his powers but he was totally safe. And yeah, the potential powerset a vampire could have has a lot of overlaps with a wizard, and a lot of overlaps with a druid. But the dru...

The first-person fiction refers to "covenants" as a generic and talks a lot about the "Carthians"; didn't you decide to change those terms?

TheFlatline: I'm pretty sure Lago means everyone gets a full round's worth of actions on every initiative pass. So a wizard casts meteor swarm three times and a fighter takes three full attack actions. Now, that's not balanced (in 3.x) because wizards are better than fighters, but between characters...

Lighttigersoul: first of all, whether 4e does this is a very different discussion from whether this is a good thing; so far I've mainly been arguing with the people (actual people, like Novembermike, who've actually posted in this thread making these arguments) that this is something the game should...