The Gaming Den

I like some of the coloured art in recent D&D books. I also adore the coloured stuff from 2Ed Planescape (at least, the Monstrous Compendium Appendix).

But a lot of it does suck.

I considered offering to do art for the Tome stuff, should they ever be turned into neat pdfs (or, Wizards forbid, actual books), but realised that "Better than some WotC art" isn't really a good qualifier. It'd look too cartoony, seeing as I use Flash for stuff that I do on the PC.

Koumei: Too cartoony???

Try this guy, and compare:

http://images.google.com/images?q=Erol+Otus

Is that Crocodile-frog raping that preying mantis thing?

Maybe it's just a friendly Pokemon battle.

*Rape attack wasn't very effective*

Or, to borrow from the old arcade game Cadash:

"... but the rape attack was lame."

Giant bug monsters are probably resistant to rape attack, yeah. Now, if it were an elf, they're weak against rape attack.

Okay, maybe my art isn't as cartoony as that, but still, it's very anime-influenced, and there are some fans that claim there's too much of that in D&D as it is - the Book of Nine Paper Cuts, for instance.

The piece that worries me more by that guy is


That monster appears to be covered in sphincters, and I don't want to ask about the veined protrusions. I hope they end in hands.

I think you should be more concerned by the humanoid's outfits, frankly. There is some serious bad touching about to go on.

The one guy looks like he's on a neverending quest to save his girlfriend.

If she's met that thing, I think he's more or less failed. I mean, seriously.

And the other guy looks like a clown. A gnomish clown. Wow, I already hate gnomes even more, just from that one picture.

But its a gnomish clown with a fur diaper and a staff with horns on. What's not to love?

Hey guys, you know all those fucked up aberrations like Aboleth, Beholder, and Mind Flayer...
Ever got curious of where they came from?




It puts that big ball-tentacle-thing rom Underdark with 3 mouths and 3 hands to shame. You know, the one that makes monster clones...

tzor at [unixtime wrote:1190040265[/unixtime]]
And then again, in AD&D, low ability scores had their own bizzare reward. Sometimes you really need to fail a check. I'm reminded of the old Bugs Bunny cartoon where Yosememe Sam rigged the piano to explode on the last note of "Believe me if all those endearing young charms" and bugs would always play the last note either flat or sharp missing the explosive. Sometimes you really had to fail a wisdom check or a intelligence check.

I don't think I ever experienced a quest where you wanted to fail an ability check..

I have once. The group were going near a spooky mountain cave thing, and the fighter had to keep on making Will saves. He eventually failed, and received a repressed memory which furthered the plot.

The idea for failing Will saves was only put in because the DM suspected him of fudging his rolls, though.

I heard somewhere that Siembeda re-inked pictures recieved as interior art for Rifts books so he could claim credit on them.

-Des

I remember an old ?A?D&D module where you could gain special abilities (or curses) by eating something *if* you failed a saving throw. Things like flying speed or ESP.

Koumei wrote:
The idea for failing Will saves was only put in because the DM suspected him of fudging his rolls, though.

Falgund wrote:I remember an old ?A?D&D module where you could gain special abilities (or curses) by eating something *if* you failed a saving throw. Things like flying speed or ESP.

Hmmmmm!


This could be 'good' for a friend of mine that insists on pre-rolling in combat (sometimes minutes before I call for the check or save) and dropping the die suspiciously close from the table, like 1 inch away.

The special trick about doing "the reverse" is that if a DM is caught the players probably become pissed, especially if they are Rollplayers or just plain temperamental.

I was in some weird campaign with a fairly large group and a DM that insisted on his own "AD&D/3.x hybrid", which involved ability score checks instead of any skill.
The catch was that you roll a plain d20, maybe mods from item or race but no skill ranks: if you roll over, you will as he put it "overextend your own reach, and pull out yoru back trying to lift that gate! URRRK!"

I dumped that campaign after the second session when I realized we weren't actually playing D&D, but something shockingly similar to Rifts. Oh it was puer fantasy, with D&D minis and all the D&D classes, but he had secretely redone all the game mechanics, and the only way to tell was to make the usual actions... and fail because it all worked completely different from expected.
Then he vanished after a month, and I haven't seen him in that hobby store in the last 3-4 years.

This one started as a reasonable question and them it just went down hill.

http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=922548

I find tactics boring. I do like melee.

WTF?

-Crissa

Crissa at [unixtime wrote:1190153747[/unixtime]]

I find tactics boring. I do like melee.

WTF?

-Crissa

Ya. Seriously. Melee is all about tactics.

Do you mean to say you find strategy boring?

No, he really finds tactics boring. He wants combat to consist merely of, "I attack."

Weren't we just having this discussion?

How about I just nominate the entire 4E section on the WotC boards? That sounds reasonable.

Personally, I find 3.0 to be more of my liking than 3.5 (with the exception of psionics). Particularly if you remove AoOs, grappling, disarming, sundering, and tripping.

I guess all that's left is charging and overrunning, right?

It's really kinda like me saying, 'I like Starcraft, except the part where you have to build and deploy units.'

-Crissa

Yeah, pretty much. He even said this gem:

For me, D&D is the most fun when you charge blindly into everything, kill anything that attacks you (often random monsters), and eventually clean out the dungeon level, taking approximately 50% of your hp in damage for the adventure, gaining half a level in xp and a few decent magic items.

So he wants pure dungeon hack, and utterly mindless dungeon hack at that, not even an interesting dungeon hack.

NineInchNall at [unixtime wrote:1190159736[/unixtime]]Yeah, pretty much. He even said this gem:

For me, D&D is the most fun when you charge blindly into everything, kill anything that attacks you (often random monsters), and eventually clean out the dungeon level, taking approximately 50% of your hp in damage for the adventure, gaining half a level in xp and a few decent magic items.

So he wants pure dungeon hack, and utterly mindless dungeon hack at that, not even an interesting dungeon hack.

My advice. Buy a decent computer. Buy WoW and Diablo 2. Leave us roleplayers alone.

Is this where the gaming industry is going? Mindless goblin popping with calculus to keep the intelligent players occupied?

Kadasbrass over on WOTC forum wrote:The game was flawed/unbalanced/broken since day 1. Everything else was just icing on the cake.

I sense another TGD convert.