The Gaming Den

Most books that are just bad (World of Synnibarr, deadEarth, Swords' Path Glory) I can still enjoy on some level. I do hate the 4th Ed. PHB because I wanted a new edition and that wasn't it. Virtually every page I can find something I detest, from the cover with the woman with one boob slightly high...

Yup, thats the nice design I was talking. Not necessarily innovating by creating those concepts (most of those were already present in Chainmail in a form or another) but in combining them together around this reward cycle of dungeon delve > take treasure > get gold > get stronger > LOOP while assu...

While I agree with you overall, I think the original D&D was indeed a great piece of design and, perhaps ironically, had much more to do with the "niche micro-games" you cite than to the toolkit ones. Sure, one can argue it used clunky/archaic tools for accomplish its design goals, bu...

RIFTS. Siembieda straight up says the game is not 'balanced', so that is conscious.... but I don't think any two writers for RIFTS can interpret the actual rules the same way. I read Eric Wujcik's writing and he seems to have a coherent way of looking at the portions of the game he wrote, but then ...

A bit sad. Initially I thought 'hey maybe I'll go do some writing on his own' but then I realized without 3.x/Pathfinder providing some sort of framework to work inside he'd probably just turn out 3d7 roll-under systems or something too awful to even bother wasting mockery on

If you can push your CL up to 22nd (for 44 HD) I think you can get Hagunemnon (ELH) as a form, which lets you grab an (Ex) ability from any four nondivine creatures you feel like, though it costs a move action. I expect that would be moderately abuseable for something.

I'd nominate David 'Zeb' Cook and Ron Edwards for the Hall of Horrors. Zeb for 2nd Ed., with all the Oberoni, Stormwind and encouragement of GM story building, fudging and illusionism. Ron Edwards in case his GNS stuff is responsible for 4E. I'm up in the air on Gary... Its a mess but you gotta star...

"It's a Huge Viper Snake with ankles made from a living Gelatinous cube"

"It's a Colossal Monstrous Scorpion with a coccyx made from a living Skeleton"

Since minus off-topic conversation the thread seems to have jammed, may as well answer. Hrm. So with that book and maybe one or two others, how would I build my cleric in terms of restrictions if I wanted to be like the 3E Cleric Archer? That is, by level 9-12 of 2E D&D, my cleric should have: 1...

Found this, thought I'd mention in case of any interest to anyone - someone's compiled a list of abilities which let characters substitute ability score mods in place of other ability score mods:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o91 ... edit?pli=1#

If at all possible I'd like to play a character that can flip-off between making themselves awesome and being able to slip back into a support role if I need to sandbag to assuage peoples' jealousy. Play a gunlugger and switch between shooting people or just sleeping with them to give them +1 to th...

The guy who initiated the kickstarter posted to rpg.net "asking for feedback" - except that it was actually just a way to get advertising into the D&D forum since the only way you get to see his rules is to give him $10. Definitely doesn't look like its going anywhere good. From the li...

I guess the conversation's what on but what's everyones favourite epic monster? The Gargantuan cat with Dex 48 ? The medium-size undead with Str 52 (heavy load: about 17 short tons) The living worm spellcaster that could've been a perfectly good non-epic monster? The scorpion with DC 95 venom (what'...

I used to hang around the epic subforums at wizards when there was such a thing. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It is a book where you read it and think 'if this worked, it'd be wicked cool'. I did, anyway. Epic is a nice place to live but you wouldn't want to visit, by which I mean that if...

If you're starting from the idea that 1E is "unplayable" and 4E is "just barely playable" then the vast majority of role-playing games ever published will probably fit into one category or the other, so you can take your pick. The worst written game I have ever personally experi...

Nahal's Reckless Dweomer + Alternate Reality (Tome of Magic) - you need to be a wildmage, but its about a 36% chance of casting a spell of any level you know at x3 effect using a 1st and a 3rd level spell slot. Duplicating spells like e.g. permanentcy/wish like this I think would avoid the Con loss/...

I honestly think that was the basic noise behind psychic focus when they first introduced it; they wanted Psions to have something to do that didn't cost power points, because an empty psion is fucking useless and just sits at the back of the party for the rest of the session until they can have a ...

A lot of the story here has some coolness, doesn't work terribly well within D&D rules though. D&D doesn't support "injured god" type characters since yes, a wish probably should work, Ashardalon's issue is apparently just some organ damage and there are D&D spells which would,...

Simply put, it's a 'hill dwarf' or a 'mountain dwarf' unless it says differently. So in FR, they'll say 'these dwarves are hill dwarves' and they'll say 'these dwarves are mountain dwarves' and that will be a good thing because 'generic dwarf' will be mostly the same from campaign to campaign. And ...

To clarify the position in case its not clear: Wyatt still only has a limited amount of space to work with so having multiple explanations of what a race looks like on different worlds, is just fluff text on top of the "generic" option. The issue with this is that what rules you need to re...

double post

I tried to read the posts, but I still don't get what this thread is supposed to be about. OK... Wyatt has to build a new RPG and has to duplicate some reasonable proportion of what the old system(s) can do in limited space. Because D&D has several campaign worlds, they have the option of tryin...

Still not seeing removal, and your particular special snowflake is specifically mentioned The Wyatt approach is that cannibal halflings or desert elves exist, but the differences are "cultural" rather than racial. If that means anything, I think he's suggesting that there shouldn't be any...

From the article... One of the appealing things about a meta-setting like Planescape or Spelljammer is that it allows players to create pretty much any character they want, drawing on material from any setting, published or unpublished. i.e. the GM doesn't have to worry that one player wants to play...

The logic in Wyatt's article:
"Hey wouldn't it be great if players could make any race of character they want?"
"Now they can, because we're removing a whole bunch of races!".

As usual they're removing options because they're a bunch of lazy hacks.