The Gaming Den

Gempunks has over 600 spells, powers, playable creatures, classlevels, and items... I tried pretty hard not to write any redundant content. And yeah, I guess if you split off each one into the atomic unique parts for some insane reason, I guess it might be closer to 1500. It's hard to count them, bu...

A classless system is a classless system. The whole damn point is that if someone wants to build a character that raises the dead, seduces through magical song, and hits things with a great axe, no one cares and there are NOT formal classed stereotypes you are stepping on the toes of. You say that,...

erik wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 23, 2021 6:09 pm

He's a fool for not using this scene instead.

Is this a 4e let's play?

Doesn't Sherlock have a famous line about how he needs to conserve his skill points for only the skills he needs most?

Neo Phonelobster Prime, there is a major problem with the freedom of point buy systems that don't enforce stereotypes at all: Look man, you can't say that an option spell ruins a spellcasting concept, My Necromancer just knows the spell fireball, my Beguiler just learned the spell Raise Dead, and my...

Sherlock is usually described as being very perceptive, I remember that in the original stories a lot of the time Sherlock would run off and Watson would chase behind confusedly and the immediate mystery was "what clue did Sherlock see that made him run this way?" So yeah, totally Wisdom-b...

Also, as in the case with base attributes, they don't really actually DO anything else. Bunching together abilities into arbitrary and limiting stereotypes is pretty much their only real function. Which is especially notable because I for one do not believe it is even their INTENDED function. I'm p...

Or you could just make sure class numbers far outstack the bonuses granted by stats, by a measure of 1/3 stat bonus and 2/3 class bonus. Or further. This actually doesn't work at all in a d20 system, an extra +3 from ability score is just as good when your class bonus is +1 against DC 10 as when yo...

I'm thinking lately that you could very well have an RPG that has NO stat for "bonus or pool of dice for social checks" I kinda like the kernel of an idea that After Sundown had, where the kinds of social checks you could make well depend on which of your ability scores were high, it mean...

Then sure, you maybe end up with a DPS-Wizard that has a dramatically different stat profile to a Tank-Wizard and maybe both are viable. But your Tank-Wizard and another Tank wizard are going to be basically the same. Yeah this bit is basically the best you can hope for, really... the ideal that a ...

Gods are a bit like character classes in our games. They don't really have any power unless someone decides to bring them in. Sure there are a lot of deities who know what will happen all over the infinite multiverse weeks in advance, but they're just sitting around waiting for some guy to ask them ...

Kaelik wrote: ↑

Wed Oct 13, 2021 12:35 pm

it just turned out "super evil demon hobbit lord" was still pretty easy to shut down

I wonder if any D&D campaign has made the Monk's Tiger Amulet into an immensely evil MacGuffin...

If the wizard deigns to cast Fly on the ubercharger then the ubercharger can potentially charge in the air.

I dunno, if they started charging licensing fees the YouTubers might all just move to Call of Cthulhu...

Yeah the kinds of stealth games that people play for fun tend to have actually very consistent enemy behavior and detection abilities... when I made stealth rules with no rolling at all, then when the players were on the stealth-offensive I found myself wishing that I'd actually planned out enemy pa...

Omegonthesane wrote: ↑

Sun Oct 03, 2021 12:13 pm

Whereas at 1 HP you can do anything and at 0 HP you can do nothing, not even plink with a crossbow.

Aha, but even at -1 HP you can consume an enemy's entire turn by being an enticing coup de grace target

deaddmwalking wrote: ↑

Sat Oct 02, 2021 12:59 am

1 hit point is as good as 100 until you take 1 more point of damage.

You could say the same thing about spell slots (especially for a spontaneous caster). Critical effectiveness failure

The best part of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion was getting to test how effective cloaking that ripples like that would be at preventing me from hitting enemies. The result: in a room with only invisible skeletons, I pretty much never missed a shot; but when there were some visible skeletons in the room as...

Doesn't sound to me like that clock mechanic involves pretending the DM isn't just making stuff up. "The DM arbitrarily decides how long the clock is" was even in the description, essentially. It's got all the dramatic tension potential of a 4e skill challenge

Ability score checks are an interesting thing to me... Strength checks both: come up way more often without some sort of skill or other level-based modifier than other ability score checks; and make the world look super stupid about 40% of the time. In 3.5e raising your strength modifier by 5 quadru...

A gacha game where your own D&D characters from your home D&D games randomly drop in packs? Seems hard to program the spyware for that...

Should Attacks of Opportunity per round increase with BAB? Limiting to 1 per round, forever, is downright stupid given that warrior classes are meant to tangle with intruders trying to get past them, and the alternative... Combat Reflexes, is both feat tax and tied to the DEX bonus only. If you're ...

Steel plate is a pretty good defense against electricity, steel is more conductive than flesh so the electricity goes through the plate instead of through your organs.

Just because a volley of 1500 arrows could slay a dragon, and the king has 100,000 archers, doesn't mean that the king is actually dumb enough to believe that he can defeat a dragon with his archers. The dragon is several times faster, the archers might even be humans who can't see in the dark. Basi...

deaddmwalking wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 23, 2021 6:44 pm

Not counting the small number of critical confirmations, if you have 1500 people with bows, you can kill a CR 20 dragon in 1 round.

I dunno about you, but I think that going from 20 archers to 1500 archers is a significant difference.