The Gaming Den

One of the things that 3.x did right was allow clerics to drop any prepared spell for a cure spell of the equivalent level. In 2nd edition, you pretty much had to prepare all the healing spells; in 3rd edition you could prepare cool stuff and sometimes even be allowed to use it. Making all wizards ...

Frank I've heard you make the "Power points makes you find the best power and spam it" argument many times and I don't think it has any legitimacy. Vancian magic has, if anything, more incentives to create a structure where you just select your best power as many times as possible. That a...

I think you hit the nail on the head, FatR: Exalted can't be changed because it's marketed at its own fans. People know what Exalted is by now and they're either going to buy it because they like that, or not buy it because they don't like that. There's relatively little room for new design work th...

hogarth wrote:That describes 99% of people on this forum. In fact, I think that describes most people on any forum!

Well Ettin is the worst mod on rpg.net, which is quite an impressive accomplishment.

In defense of MTP I think it's a valid game feature since if you don't want really abstract mechanics (i.e. conflict resolution mechanics or mechanics in which how a character does something doesn't matter) or really complicated mechanics with a modifier for everything you pretty much HAVE to use MT...

One thing about what made 4e such a disaster that doesn't get mentioned much is that then they started bringing outside people in to playtest and get feedback they used RPGA members. I don't think much RPGA feedback got included in the text but I think that trying to make a game that would cater to ...

After downloading this it looks like a good source of ideas to steal from. I'm putting together a sandboxy game at the moment, and while the setting is different there were still a bunch of things I could steal from the 10-20 pages I skimmed through. I'm sure the whole 300 page document will have p...

Looked over it briefly. Nothing was terrible, but I sort of thought it would thoroughly flesh out 20-30 areas and 20-30 dungeons. Instead I got a brief overview of 1000 areas with some plot hooks. The writing of NPC's, Dungeons, and everything is still required by me, so it's unclear why I'd ever u...

Here's a hexcrawl setting I've helped develop for a bit over a year now. The hexes are connected up in a lot of ways and contain more detail than you get from the hexcrawl settings I've seen before so they might be useful for people here who want some locations to steal for their own settings. Compi...

What I'd do: -Make "have a big old book of spells" be expensive enough that the fighter is going to have a better suite of useful magic items than the wizard to even things out a bit and get fighters out of GTFO situations (winged boots, yadda yadda yadda). -Slant the saving throw math so ...

It seems that a lot of people thing D&DN reminds them of their least favorite version of D&D. I haven't kept up with the newer versions but the last one I saw basically struck me as Essentials taken to its logical conclusion with some old edition window dressing.

Will it make money though? It's been proven in the past that a game's profit and 'balance' are not related in any way. D&D is D&D and right now most reactions to D&DN playtests are positive and hopeful. Actually, not really. There's a growing collection of playtesters on EnWorld who tho...

Bizarrely never had an issue with overpowered casters, I think that the Wizards > Fighter power divide was overshadowed by the much more massive People Who Do Understand How 3ed Multiclassing Works > People Who Don't Understand How 3ed Multiclassing Works yawning chasm, it's hard to be overshadowed ...

My reading of the transcript is: attack rolls are attacker rolls only, stuff that requires a Saving Throw requires both sides to roll. I'm assuming that when they mean the defender and attacker both roll, they're not talking about attack rolls, since I'm assuming that they're not THAT stupid and giv...

Well a problem in 3ed was that PC AC scales pretty damn fast so that low level monsters can't hit higher level PCs, even if the difference in levels vs. CR was relatively small. It'd be easier to just keep PC AC from scaling so fast rather than make up new categories of monsters.

1. Has as good balance as TSR-D&D or better. This really shouldn't be that hard. 2. Has combat that runs at least a good bit faster than 3ed. Doesn't have to be lightning fast, but I don't want to sit around for 15 minutes waiting for my goddam turn. 3. Doesn't have a gazillion sub-systems like ...

What's especially hilarious is looking at the Epic Level Handbook and comparing what it lets casters and non-casters do. Casters get to become gods, non-casters get to splice rope.

If you run TSR-D&D correctly, combat for fighter types is a LOT less boring than in 3ed since while you're making the same basic "I attack it" decision: A. Rounds go a LOT faster so you spend less time with your thumb up your butt than in 3ed. So the ratio of decisions in combat : time...

I think that 3ed changed plenty of things but a lot of the changes are under the hood so that the average casual player who isn't playing attention to what's going on doesn't notice them as much as the change to 4ed when they're more in your face. Sure the way that things like combat are calculated ...

What I'm thinking of doing is to have clerics get spells but the gods all be of questionable reality and all of the information about them being contradictory by having the entities that grant spells either be crazy/liars/completely inhuman in their thought process or some combination of that. The b...

Whatever else can be said about Pathfinder, it certainly READS a lot better than 4ed or any came I could make personally (I tend towards bare bones when it comes to rule text, which works fine in play but isn't going to sell me any books). I don't agree. Pathfinder rulebooks present all the rules h...

I'm having a good time being a player in a one on one email game of Burning Wheel. I wouldn't normally play Burning Wheel face to face because of how many things you have to keep track of but it works well for this since the mechanics are good for really keeping it focused on my single character.

Due to players never remember any god's name, I'm probably just going to give them titles like the seven gods in Westeros. It's pretty easy to remember which one is the Smith and which one is the Mother. Hard to add more in-depth stuff in if your players don't even remember which is which.

I'm just being an advocate of the Devil here, but isn't it largely agreed that PrCs for Wizard and Cleric generally gave you more powers for nothing? I'm not saying it's a particularly well thought out or implemented fix, but I can kind of see their motivation. Clerics are not affected by this - th...

To get a game to sell what's more important than solid mechanics is the ability to really kick-start the imagination. Virtually all good-selling games have been far better at the second than the first. Whatever else can be said about Pathfinder, it certainly READS a lot better than 4ed or any came I...