The Gaming Den

But now the claim is 'take 20' only rarely comes up, so back to that "only rarely" thing. How rare is it? Nobody except you is saying anything about the "rarity" of take 20. We are saying that there are restrictions on taking 20 and you are taking that to mean it is "rare&q...

No you can't get a fucking estimate for the number of times a DM will decide that the PCs can have uninterrupted time to try something until they get it right. You also can't have an estimate for the number of times a PC will ride a gryphon or fuck a tavern wench. The rules say you can take 20 whene...

That's the D&D definition of magic, which boils down to "whatever spells do" and is a complete dead end.

A scientific explanation can be given for magic .... but satisfactory explanations which can be given for magic based on rather arbitrary pagan rituals such as in D&D are harder. Once you can scientifically explain something it ceases to become magic. A classic example of this is the enormous p...

If any understanding was shown, at all, I wouldn't call it a misunderstanding. I woefully underestimated comprehension here, I freely admit. Yes, your own. Find the nearest community college and take a reading comprehension course. It shouldn't cost more than $300 and you might make friends with an...

Back about 8 years ago when I played DII the rule was that if you're trying to play through Normal, Nightmare, and Hell as fast as possible in single player mode, then the spellcasters (sorceress and necromancer) are literally the only way to go because eventually weapon users literally can't functi...

4E doesn't make me angry so much as sad at the loss of potential. I appreciate that 4E tried to do a New Thing with a rebuild from the ground up and specific design goals. And it hasn't so much failed at those goals as succeeded in a disappointing way. Pathfinder is just Paizo sticking their dick in...

The 4E disease rules are nicely compartmentalized. Change the attack vs. Fort in 4E to a level appropriate fort save DC in 3E and you're basically done converting the overall mechanic to 3E, all that's left is pasting in 3E conditions instead of 4E status effects.

No. That is not the same thing. At all . I'm talking about people throwing around attacks that knock down buildings and you're talking about conditionally halving that? Half of "fine pink mist" is "chunky salsa" not "totally survives". Feng Shui has a shtick that says &...

That makes no sense. You make no sense. The only way a player can be absolutely sure there isn't a trap is if they take 20 to search, and then only if they assume I'm not a fucker who put the search DC higher than they can achieve or played some kind of bullshit semantics game where saying "I t...

Under the current system, if you aren't aware of a trap you automatically trigger it, which means that traps in D&D are by default a tedious Gygaxian horror where the DM is waiting for someone to move onto the Special Square without saying the magic words "I search for traps" so he can...

It says nothing of the sort. In 3.5 it is very clearly a flat DC to detect an invisible creature depending on what it's doing and what it is, and you have to beat that DC by 20 to figure out what space it's occupying. Not even size modifiers apply to this, so a 40 detects an invisible pixie as easil...

The only problem with taking 20 is that retards think it's reasonable to take 20 on every single Search check. There's no way a group of adventurers is going to sit there quietly for two minutes while the rogue searches a ten-by-ten section of hallway. That's the basic problem with D&D's trap p...

Admittedly I'm not an expert at the Pathfinder rules, but I really don't give a fuck if the Pathfinder skill rules don't tickle your Verisimilitude boner by having a different skill for not being noisy than not being seen. It's much worse to have the game force players to spend 3 skill points/level ...

Note that most of those criticisms apply to 3.5 as well; it's not just a Pathfinder thing. The only stupid innovation that Pathfinder added was combining Listen+Spot and Hide+Move Silently, so that bright light makes you easier to hear and Eyes of the Eagle should now be named Eyes, Ears, Nose, Ton...

The system doesn't matter, really. The point is that if you have The Hulk and The Thing fighting each other, they are literally throwing out attacks that would instantly jelly The Punisher, who can be killed by a dude with a switchblade and can't carry a gun big enough to make The Hulk notice he exi...

The difference is, instead of sitting for five seconds and staring at the players until someone says "I take 20, durrrr," I just say "You can eventually open the lock if you want", and we get back to playing the game if it's an 'eventually openable lock'. I never said "take...

The weirdest thing, to me, is that if you do things like give Batman his regular toughness, and then add his Detective skill to make his toughness equal to Superman, with the caveat "damage reduced by the Detective skill added to toughness is a representation of Batman's analytical mind keeping...

No, it is not understandable at all . One of his "critiques" of the Take 20 rule is based off of a fundamental and deliberate choice to misunderstand the rule. The other "critique" is that he doesn't like that take 20 always takes exactly 20 times longer than trying the check onc...

Because if you give the fighter an ability that says he can move from his current space to a space within his normal move speed ignoring all terrain, obstacles, and even line of effect people cry and say that because it's hard for them to imagine how the Fighter is getting from point A to point B wh...

The fight vs. Solomon Grundy is even more bullshit, since he literally has a special ability that says when he "dies" he's actually faking it, and then another one that forces his enemies to try and check under his mask (setting off some bullshit that turns the fight in his favor) before c...

I have no idea why the fixation is on locks, it just keeps going to back there, for some reason. I just think 'take 20' should have some significant limitations. I mean, suppose one guy has skill Gaming (Chess) at +4 and another has skill Gaming (Chess) at +5. If both players take 2 minutes for eac...

It's not like there's a reason to force players to roll their way through dozens of challenges with no chance of pressure. Picking a lock while the room fills with water and orcs throw rocks at you is a dungeon crawl, picking ten locks by taking 20 with no chance of failure is an archeological dig.

Before you decide on a skill system, you have to decide on what a skill does . 3E decided to focus on simulation, which works fairly well for things like Balance and Swim, but utterly fails for opposed checks because training and stat mods can push a skill bonus right off the RNG which breaks oppose...

If you scale Batman up to be as strong as Superman when he's fighting Justice League baddies then he's superman level strong and is definitely NOT a "normal" anymore. *a-hem* Yeah, but Batman as an example of the badass normal trope has so much traction that if the comics actually explici...