The Gaming Den

Yeah, Freedom of Movement is probably not something characters can easily explain in game terms. When people ask a wizard how freedom of movement works, he probably gets irritated and rambles something about flux capacitors and 88 miles per hour. But that's still not really 'dissociated,' it's just...

Why? If you run into a bit of crunch that the party hates, how does it ruin everything after that? Do you game with people so immature that one instance of dislike is enough for them to swear off anything associated with it forever? Even in the Astral Projection situation, if the party hates it so v...

Which still boils down to just communicating like rational adults with the people you game with.

So... the entire point of this is that bending the system is bad? I'd personally add the caveat that they're bad for groups that don't communicate with each other. If you're playing with some people you should have a pretty basic idea of what level of system fuckery you consider fun as a whole. Othe...

I'm tired of reading discussions about "disassociated mechanics". Let me summarize the first week of a class I took on modeling and simulating wargames: this is a model . Our job as game designers is to throw away the vast majority of the situation's complexity to make the simulation run ...

The idea that it's somehow bad to expect to get items key to your character is pretty bizarre. Especially when it comes down to magical weapons. If you're playing a high-magic campaign, people are going to expect the type of high fantasy where the heroes actually find weapons they can use, not purel...

We shouldn't be arguing about this at all. Cantrips and Orisons alone [Things like Create Water and Prestidigitation] already can't be scripted. The premise that it can fails before we even get away from the basic stuff. In 3E and 4E, no less. Doesn't stop people from creating a generic make-a-powe...

I mean, once I figured out that I could write a script to generate powers (and power names) in under ten minutes, I knew that the system was designed by some profoundly uncreative people. Not only that, but you could take that output and feed it straight into a video game, and it would work, and th...

I think that nerds speculating on business are the absolute funniest nerds. "Well you see I took Macro Ec 101 15 years ago so obviously what they are going to do is [insert idiotic business decision here]." D&D will exist because it makes a profit; even if it's a relatively thin profit...

I have fun when I play a balanced system that exists without gentlemen's agreements or massive, massive houseruling.

So, basically, 4E. Or 3E/earlier at 1-6.

edit: To be fair, 4E does have the horrible remnants of system mastery that 3E made so prevalent, but it's slightly better about them.

I'm pointing out that the difference between two skill bonuses in the same party is greater than the entire range of results on a d20. If one person minmaxxes for one particular skill and another doesn't and actually accumulates a negative for the skill? I mean, come on, man. Your example assumes t...

It's pretty impossible to say no you would never have liked 4E it's always bad 100% of the time no your opinions would never have changed, because you're on a forum dedicated to making 3E playable past 8 with a massive set of revisions

[*]In 4e it's possible for two PCs (or one PC with two different skills) to have a +18 divergence in skill bonuses at level 1 and the likely divergence increases with level. For example: A character with Str as a dump stat might have an untrained Athletics of -1, yet they could have +5 from their 2...

Look, there's some crap that's not really going to be noticed the first go-round. But there's some stuff that's so blatantly obviously broken that it's obvious that they didn't even try. I can forgive 3E D&D multiclassing because it doesn't really start to fuck itself over until around level 6 ...

Even 4E would have been about 10 times better with a serious and strict play testing regime. So would any game, and it's easy to say that after the fact. Just look at 3E; they had to release an entire updated edition to fix things that should have been noticed in anything like playtesting. And they...

tell me what 4th edition products have come out in the last year since the switch to essentials? i remember Mearls or someone else stating that ALL new products will be based on essentials moving forward. this makes the 4th edition PHB and classes outmoded, ergo 4th edition is no longer being suppo...

4th edition is no longer being produced? 4th edition has been replaced with Essentials. like 3.0, 4th edition lasted about 3 years before being replaced. they are observing and correlating events with past ones and seeing the pattern. I mean, just from lurking I know that you're functionally retard...

So, I keep seeing people say that 4E is dying, but without any tangible evidence. Why? What I want most from 5E is a better social/skill system than 3E/4E. Both suck really terribly between 3E's retarded static targets and 4E's broken RAW skill challenges. Combat's just fine, I like the way casters ...

The problem with fallacies is people attempt to use them in the place of actual arguments. This is especially bad with fallacies that aren't actually fallacies but instead were made up for specific circumstances. For instance, if I came up with the Yep Fallacy wherein an argument is invalid if it c...

The problem with fallacies is people attempt to use them in the place of actual arguments. This is especially bad with fallacies that aren't actually fallacies but instead were made up for specific circumstances. For instance, if I came up with the Yep Fallacy wherein an argument is invalid if it cr...