The Gaming Den

Lore sounds like it doesn't do much. Traditionally everything you can do with a Knowledge or Lore skill is either: a poor substitute for using metagame knowledge (and if there's a game where players don't use metagame knowledge, I ain't seen it) irrelevant, because the DM needed you to know X for t...

Actually, I've already decided to go with 4 Attributes x 5 skills. The 5 skills: combat, magic, exploration, social, and lore (or something very close to them) are meant to represent roles or jobs that each player can have. Character creation will be set up to allow for characters to have some skill...

Stop me if you've heard this one before: I'm working on a Fantasy Heartbreaker. What I'm going for is a rules-lite, mythic high fantasy game in the vein of higher level D&D and Exalted. That is, a superhero game in a ren fair outfit. The system is based primarily on a hybridization of concepts f...

I completely agree with the notion that D&D should make the non-combat mini-games just as big a part of the overall experience as the combat mini-game. I've never thought that D&D should shy away from videogame influences IF they can be implemented properly in the system, but I also believe ...

I don't have any hard data on this, but from my perspective it seems like there are more female gamers now than ever before.

yeah, I'm gonna have to agree with Flatline on this one. Hell, I've even gone so far as to add size modifiers to more stuff -- namely, jump checks, climb checks, and falling damage. it's always perplexed me how they went through the trouble of giving a nod to the cube-square law, but stopped short ...

RobbyPants wrote: Although, if anything, I was proud of her for considering her PrC choice at level 1 instead of level 5.

Planar Shepherd.

Have they not heard of sampling bias? The people visiting the site right now are the people playing/preferring 4e almost overwhelmingly. Of course that sample set is going to use the most positive value statement for their preferred selection. If 4e wasn't the most "just right" for any qu...

I'll chime in for Legends of Anglerre...it's a Fate based fantasy game...so you have to be able to wrap your head around aspects...but it has a fair amount of crunch and world-building tools.

I wonder if D&D would really be served by broadening the definitions of a class beyond it's traditional flavor and adding infinite points of articulation in character building? D&D is the gateway by which most gamers enter into the hobby, it stand to reason that the game should be accessible...

I wonder if anyone has ever thought to write character options granting automatic successes to certain rolls. I briefly considered a dicepool-based game wherein players rolled a handful of d6's, counting successes against a target "threshold" of 1 to 10, with 4's and higher on the dice cou...

LR wrote: Edit: Is there a name for players who want to play Logistics and Dragons? It's weird if we can talk about Trevor while his counterpart remains unnamed.

I humbly suggest:

"Aghammon, Civil Engineer of the Sable Tower"

And lets not forget that while 1 chicken may not be much danger, a whole roost of them being controlled by someone with animal control abilities, would be frightening. And would therefore be statted up as a "swarm" instead of a mundane chicken. I can stat up a swarm in any system that has...

My chicken takes Craft and uses it to make additional chickens... :tongue: I think that actually falls under "performance". Buh-dum-tish. But yeah...no sane GM is ever going to have a meaningful interaction with a mundane chicken that involves more than a low DC survival or profession: co...

MGuy wrote:Because Jump, Climb, etc are things animals do...

Chickens. Skill ranks.

MGuy wrote:You're seriously going to say that being ABLE to stat out a chicken as an argument against the system? You've got to be joking.

Chickens...with skill ranks.

There are rules in DnD for generating monsters and creatures like a chicken. Clear consistent ones for 1st level, small animals. Even gives them a list of skills they can have and all of that stuff. So I can spend my free time assigning skill ranks and feats to a chicken. Huzzah. This just became m...

The aftermath was that most people just canceled their subscriptions and told WotC to fuck off. It's sad because essentials was actually a decent product, but the marketing of it was terrible. They probably plan to lay low a while before either releasing 5E or selling the D&D brand to some othe...

Winds of magic? Alignment of the stars? Cooperation of the Cosmos? edit to add: I really, really , want magic rituals that must be performed on certain days of the year, or at certain places in the world, or not be performed at all. In Warhammer FRP, magic is accomplished by shaping chaos into spel...

That's completely backwards. Option paralysis results when the options are so varied that the best option isn't obvious. If the moves are similar then it becomes easy to pick the best one, because you only have to evaluate one variable (fireball vs. cone of cold) rather than several (cone of cold v...

"do i hit" is from immature players. If they ask it, just sit there and stare at the player for a minute or two when they ask it and make them wait for you to tell them. You really aren't solving your problems by giving them more information, when the problem isnt the information, but the...

My take on Radiant and Necrotic energy: These are actually natural forces which aren't inherently good OR evil. Necrotic energy is basically the force of entropy, which is the inevitable decay of all things, whereas Radiant energy is the force of creation and possibility. In D&D-land, radiant en...

I have a huge list of house rules and I was even using the 'bump monster damage up, deflate monster hit point' houserule for quite some time. Could you elaborate on some of these houserules? You generally have some good ideas and I'm curious to read what you've done with 4E. Personally, I refuse to...

i.e. Why does the Thief get to "climb walls" but the fighter has to "mountaineer"? And what the fuck is the difference? Why does the Elf get to use a sword and cast spell? Why can't I learn to do that? Don't get me wrong, every game has moments that break immersion, I just remem...

I find it doubly laughable that people are seriously arguing that a cloak is a monster ability. If you kill Mordenkainen, does he drop his Faithful Hound? Yeah, you pick up his spell book and copy the fucking spell. Next? Touche'. What I mean, however, is that Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound isn't an...