The Gaming Den

-> The party cleric planeshifts to plane x and the wizard then teleports to place y... Paragon Tier: "I give a fuck about space and distances!" Example: Phoenix, Superman. People who can travel arbitrary distances through the DC universe: Anyone with a boomtubes or zetatubes (say, Robin)....

In the DC universe they occasionally have bits where they say you're not even supposed to be allowed to talk to ...some number... level intelligences because they are so successfully manipulative that a conversation with them can reduce you to nothing more than their pawn. but being manipulative in...

Don't look at the nymph/medusa, don't listen to to diplolancer/siren, and take penalties (blindness/deafness) when so protected. You don't see as a problem when the half-elf diplomancer is so persuasive that it's comparible to a supernatural compulsion. In the DC universe they occasionally have bit...

Going through some old threads, I saw some discussion of what goes into making an RPG book, and one of those things was fluff text, like short stories. It made me wonder: what the fuck is the point of that shit? I mean, in no book I've owned have I ever read more than a couple sentences of any shor...

One of the thing about high level people often don't get is that the state of being high level is perhaps best defined by your ability to make the world warp around you. That's why I use WoT as an example. High level character command armies when their not destroying them. This is why MCs have a ha...

Being a mount in a spelunking game is not a problem if you also happen to be a giant spider or can fly. But that is a shitty example, because in a game focusing on spelunking, any character that can't climb very well is penalised. As for playing the Normandy, you start with a crippled pilot that ne...

There is an easy way around the airship conundrum. The airship becomes the character and has the "pilot" class feature. This way, the Millenium Falcon character gets to participate in the entire of Star Wars campaign, through class feature granted proxies. Sure, it sucks for the members o...

RE: No Witch Queens. Not sure if this point has been brought up yet in the ten pages of discussion, but it seems to me that whether you have an army or not is a rather Elennsar-ish ability, to use the Den's terms. It is much like having the thunder guide PRC's "you're in the news" "po...

Entrails Reading: (Kn. Nature) The soothsayer kills an animal, usually a chicken, cuts its stomach open, and pokes around at the guts that spill out. Somehow, this tells him that the orc clan will attack next week, and the harvest will be a bad one. Possibly helpful tidbit: Entrails reading is ofte...

The fact that character progression is mandatory at all really pisses in peoples' Cheerios. A lot of people just don't want to get to level 8. There should be an option to just stay at one level and continue picking up skills and bullshit abilities. You'll notice how in the WotC thread, so many peo...

The fact that character progression is mandatory at all really pisses in peoples' Cheerios. A lot of people just don't want to get to level 8. There should be an option to just stay at one level and continue picking up skills and bullshit abilities. You'll notice how in the WotC thread, so many peo...

However, I would like to add a caveat to A, which is that I'm not sure that the people who claim that they want to play Swordy McSwordface actually are adverse to gaining phlebtonium sources later on. I can't recall anyone ever throwing a tantrum because they got an artifact sword, nor can I recall...

These people really do exist in great numbers! Caedrus's ideas seem like pretty good suggestions of ways to nerf casters without making casters weak and boring. Glad you like it. But yeah, that's basically what I'm getting at. Wizards and Fighters have all sorts of little (or big) features that ben...

So making it so that the Fighter is better at using magic swords or making it so that flying creatures aren't perfectly stable fortresses in the sky in a way rather unique to D&D stops the game from changing? Okay. I have to assume that once again I'm being trolled. What the fuck does how well ...

AHA, the text wall doesn't stop from getting any taller You can mostly go fuck yourself because the answers to "how to keep the fighter relevant while game changes" is not "stop the game from changing". If you want that go play 4e. So making it so that the Fighter is better at u...

To make this thread a somewhat different than its many ancestors, I'll ask the following question: How can we give people the non-magical heroes they want to play so much.... while dodging all the problems that come with it? We're talking about games so of course we must give people what they want....

The tragic part of this pushback is that all too often people lean towards curbing the parts of the game that the medium does so much better than videogames (such as knot cutting abilities that sword powers don't really compete with), rather than trying to push the envelope of the fighter. I find th...

RPGs are by definition more open ended than a board game or card game can be. This means that actions can have fuzzy inputs. While in a board game you can determine "exact" inputs, in an RPG you can't. And that gives you two options: Approximate the fuzzy inputs and then generate a random...

So if semi-related but more interesting tangents are okay, I might as well turn it back to pen and paper RPGs with a controversial tangentially related topic. I already seem to have gotten across the point that you don't actually care about hit %s on their own... but more an issue of how much of an ...

One thing I'm interested in is "growing out" in-between levels, and not through simply completing a relevant activity (e.g. kill a zombie to get zombie killing skill). For example, being able to add new spells to your spellbook as a Wizard... something that, say, Fighters don't really hav...

One thing I'm interested in is "growing out" in-between levels, and not through simply completing a relevant activity (e.g. kill a zombie to get zombie killing skill). For example, being able to add new spells to your spellbook as a Wizard... something that, say, Fighters don't really have...

You can't save the state of a RNG, as long as you're talking about true randomization. That'd be illogical. I'm not sure what you think "true randomization" is supposed to mean in the context of computer games. Now, I don't know anything specifically about Wesnoth's RNG. However, I'm pret...

What's the context, here? A 60% miss chance for a given action means something completely different when you're talking about having one action vs having five, or whether you're talking about all or nothing actions or ones that have secondary effects even if you miss, or whether or not the miss cha...

What's the context, here? A 60% miss chance for a given action means something completely different when you're talking about having one action vs having five, or whether you're talking about all or nothing actions or ones that have secondary effects even if you miss, or whether or not the miss chan...

You don't necessarily even need a miss chance. Plenty of games forego random failure entirely (Or make the chances very small, and often a result of enemy features rather than just a default chance to miss). Others still allow you to accomplish things in the event of randomized failures (such as hav...