The Gaming Den

Hm, so it's "use wish", "get ridiculous gems" (what IS that plane? I've never heard of it... or maybe just never read up about it), and "trade expensive stuff". 1st ed. Manual of the Planes listed a quasi-elemental plane of Minerals (where Earth borders on the positive...

Here's another weird one, from a friends homebrew game years back (it was a Waterworld inspired, roll-a-bucket-of-d20s-and-count-the-successes system ;) - so I guess I call this Waterworld initiative) Each round everyone rolls off, and the highest roller gets an action. No one else gets an action th...

Table-cyclic initiative: go around the physical table the players are sitting on. Sometimes combined with deterministic initiative (like Dragon Warriors' characters acting in order of Reflexes score) - in which case players are seated based on their characters' Reflexes. The "Advantage" sy...

The game systems "+a d6, minus a d6" means you'll often have 0 or a very low modifier on the dice most of the time, with not-too-infrequent explosions where someone gets the roll to run up a stream of bullets. A -1 or -2 is very significant, so its critical to maximixe attack/defense stat ...

2) Is there any book out there that's worse than Lunar that's not called FATAL? I'd really like to know. I love torturing myself with bad RPGs. In terms of sheer bad mechanics, I highly recommend Powers and Perils. There's no furry action (though there is random misogyny; female characters get an I...

Hieronymous Rex wrote:

CCarter wrote:Just out of curiousity, which one was that?

I just looked it up, and as it turns out, it was Buffalo Castle.

Cool, thanks.

Tunnels & Trolls more or less works this way. I have read that one module for it went as far as to allow you a Luck save to abscond from the dungeon altogether , no matter where you were in it, as long as you weren't trapped. Just out of curiousity, which one was that? Of course, T&T also h...

Hi Deanruel Just to nitpick, you go from noting that you're talking about "skill challenges generally" (i.e. any skill check) to 4e skill challenges specifically later on. I think it'd make sense to not have the same terminology here for both. Also note with your Jump example, in 3.5 RAW a...

Is it just me, or is: "Player's Options: Heroes of Shadow" a lot more like "Player's Essentials: Heroes of the Forgotten Land" than it is like a 4e title? -Username17 But Frank, it is a 4E title. The "Essentials" and "Options" stuff is 4E and always will be. ...

Giving 1st level barbarians pounce was a great idea... As if they have >1 attack and actually care. Someone must like orc double-axes, I suppose.

Re-read the fast play rules for this recently - have never actually played it though. The rules seem to make alot of use of the Amazing/Good/Typical breakdown of results (under 1/4 of skill, under 1/2 of skill, under skill rating) on d20. They really seem to build on this in the damage rules and the...

The breakpoint in OD&D is "Name" level - this could be 8th, 9th, or 10th depending on the classes. Fighter is 9th (Lord), Wizard is 10th (Wizard), etc. Except for really weird classes like assassin (and Druid, which is beyond weird) the number of xp needed to progress from [Name Level]...

RobbyPants wrote:Concentration, perhaps, but every caster already wants Concentration.

Seems semi-reasonable to me, actually. In the grand scheme of things that might even be a balancing factor .

Oh and Perform for bard, obviously.

Ditto what someone said about more spells/turn for casters being a bad idea. As well as the power factor, each spell involves choices which will slow down turns. Giving fighters "poor" BCB (or Magic Rating) did look to me like it has the issue of strongly encouraging fighters to multiclass...

I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with a compelling reason why either boiling water doesn't make steam or why steam is incapable of turning a turbine. I can see why trying to keep things simple might make the game more fun, but as soon as you say "it doesn't work" to something simp...

Well there's always the Wrath of the Immortals D&D approach: the gods want to produce more gods (from promising mortals), so no interfering in human affairs so that mortals don't become "pets" and no more promising candidates arise. Other than that, re. steam engines and germ theory of...

Bonus typing's main advantage is probably simplicity - depending on how many bonus types you have. IMHO probably the most effective system of bonus control is to build a "diminishing returns" function into whatever gives the modifier - higher expenditures give less and less back. D&D o...

Murtak wrote:More subsystems do not indicate a finer granularity. Die size is an example of granularity. What K describes is something else entirely. I can't find a simple description for it, but in a computer game it would be a physics engine.

"Emergent complexity?"

Granularity : The extent to which a system is broken down into small parts. Yeh, and it's those small parts interacting with each other that produces things like Grapplemancer or Triptastic builds. I mean, I don't think anyone ever wanted the Uttercold Assault Necromancer build when they built all ...

Regarding mass saving throws - Well, with saving throws what often slows it down is the addition. Subtract their bonus from the DC so you find what number passes on the raw D20, and you can easily roll half a dozen or more d20s at once. I'm not sure I'm recommending this method exactly (I've never u...

LOL. Sort of a Mexican Stand Off system. Re. RCs point: I believe the +3 to initiative from Circling actually doesn't change initiative order at all , so there isn't a paradox. In the context of the JAGS system: if you beat a foe's initiative by 5 they can't screw up your action with interrupts: tha...

Re: JAGS. Yep, I think that's a fair assessment. '5 over' is the margin where a longer action can't be interrupted - this could probably use some sort of explicit defining term. It is crunchier than I like, personally, but it is interesting. The major beef I'd have with the system is the relatively ...

Hey I'm late to the party (just joined), but there are a couple of other action/initiative systems out there I can think of: *Runequest Strike Ranks: rounds are divided into segments 1-10. I don't recall how first action is calculated initially, but after this timing of your next action depends on w...