The Gaming Den

I remember playing in a 3.5 game where the players all started as level 1 members of one of the NPC classes... but are considered 'level 0', so that after you properly become level 1, everything that you'd have as a level 1 npc (hp, skills, whatever) is basically a free bonus for you for the rest of...

Getting more then a little sidetracked here, but Cory Doctorow has received several awards for his writing... including the John W. Campbell Award (twice, actually; and it's in the top tier of SF-specific awards). David Weber, by contrast, only has two bottom-tier awards (the kind of things they han...

I shrug. Such is the fate of many a paperback. Similarly, sales figures aren't everything, as is richly evidenced by the drivel that usually tops the best-sellers list. Free books are a marketing strategy, typically employed because the publisher thinks it'll bring net profit. That said, I'd present...

Weber is third-rate. Only his newest books aren't being given out for free by Baen. That's a sales gimmick, with proven results (you know, you give the first few works of a series out for free, and then charge for the new releases, so people who are reading a series pay to read it when it comes out...

Personally, I'd go with the "it's stupid to have things randomly immune to mind-affecting because Types shouldn't work that way" fix from Tome of Necromancy, which would let you straight use Binding and not worry. But if you feel the need to bend over backwards to appease bad rules, feel f...

Good one. That was richly deserved; I hope you felt better afterwards.

So... are we doing something today-ish? That's in just over 7 hours, if it's happening, but I've seen no confirmations, and instead seen Korgan drop, so...

Naval combat in a D&D-type world falls into much the same trap as mass combat in such a world does, and I haven't ever encountered really good rules to handle either. The RPG-type rules always seem to fall down terribly on doing the battle end of things, and don't feel all that satisfying, espec...

*Gets up at 6:30 AM*

*Sees Praetor isn't on*

*Goes back to sleep*

Okay, think I have my Internet situation figured out for next month, so I should be good for Sept 2.

7am here. Still, I can probably manage it.

I remember that, yeah; it neatly isolated all the problems, but didn't actually present any solutions. I really wish that particular rant actually was followed by "some playable rules regarding illusions that won't cause you to stab out your own eyes".

I don't know if/when I'll be available in September, since I'll just have moved, and suspect a non-zero chance that there won't be any Internet yet.

I would be inclined to suspect that the article is simplified; explaining the legal specifics of how only the increase in savings is collected seems like it'd go beyond the scope of the article, and not be interesting to the majority of readers. Either way, if someone's habitually taking it all out ...

Good fucking question. I could be snide and tell you to google moar (the same file is in many other places, if you look), or quasi-helpful and tell you to use a proxy to get around the inane censorship imposed by your evil government, or more specifically helpful and tell you to look at the very fir...

If you put it to a majority vote, food would be free. Also, rent. Alcohol for sure. I mean, look at California. Putting laws and taxation/spending proposals up for a majority vote is a real thing they do, and it turns out that what people want is more government services for free. That's not exactl...

After Sundown can be found here.

Yeah, really. If confronted with a situation in which I'm sitting at a table with a guy with nigh-perfect stats like that, and a DM who insists that I only get to roll once, and have to keep those stats whatever they are, that's a deal-breaker right there. That said, my DM's have generally either us...

Also, Plant Growth is generally a pretty nice spell to have for combat purposes, irrespective of it's economic value. It essentially creates a ridiculously huge area in which it takes a full-round action to move 5 feet... but which doesn't actually provide cover. In other words, it turns an arbitrar...

Well, since it's an 'over the next year' deal with a half-mile radius, an itinerant priest of agriculture is in a pretty sweet spot, since he's only spending his 3rd-level domain slot on keeping his shtick running, and can still carry around Blindness or Summon Monster III or something to threaten l...

Excellent; that works nicely. That said, how aware of Illumians are the locals, in general? This can range from "What's with the glowy symbols?", in which case Malak can easily pretend to be a normal human who's under the influence of some kind of buff spell... to "Hey look, another o...

Regarding motivation... the best way to specifically put Malak somewhere is a quest item. If a letter of introduction was sent to an 'allied' church, that suggests something big-ish... perhaps he's there to investigate rumors that the Chalice was in the area, or something; there are any number of ar...

Trufax: I haven't had a player use either of those in a game I've run. That said, resolution time is a cruel and demanding god, to whom many sacrifices must be made. If someone's going to go through the list and take a whole bunch of fiddly abilities that let him go back through the round a day late...

In the past, whenever I've been trying to run PbP and there are interrupts causing slowdown, what I usually do is I have a quick chat with any players who have notable interrupts, and ask them in advance under what circumstances they would plan to use that ability. Since D&D has tons of fiddly j...

Personally, I wouldn't be worried. If crazy guy has opened a game store, then take it as a sign of his impending bankruptcy, and take advantage of all the time he has to be running his store to run your own games and solidify your own influence independent of his shenanigans.