The Gaming Den

True, sorry.

In the example, I can't really tell the difference between "manga" and "fantastical realism".

There's also a big difference between "At chargen, you pick your power to have default strength X, but can scale it down in play" and "At chargen, your powers start at minimum strength 1, but over the course of leveling up you can scale it up to strength X". Especially since in t...

If you're going to toss out the concept of "necessary fundamental adjustments", maybe try spelling out what they were. "If you take this broken, horrible system and fix all the broken horrible parts, it's rad!" may be true, but it's completely fucking empty until you make it more...

So, like, maybe you'll have a shitload of attacks of opportunity, then you use your standard action on Reach, then a shitload of enemies happened to have readied actions that triggered on that (?????) and they run past you but it's still your turn so you can nail them with AOOs?

It's lame. "Shooting a dude with a fireball" should always be at least semi-viable, and writing half a dozen variants of "you shoot a dude with a fireball" is pretty weak. I'm also not sure it really tracks that well with source material. I think in most stories you can use the s...

I like the idea of modular packages. Chargen and ability selection is complex enough that clumping and decision trees are good sorting tools. 3e spell levels shit the bed on that front, but that's because its word bloat is even worse than Lago's worst-case scenario.

Does shadzar think that there were literal wizards and magic-casting clerics back in the 1400s? With him, I actually can't be sure he doesn't. This word vomit about medieval and what stuff should be core and what stuff should be optional and his boner for an absurdly-limited paradigm of what setting...

I'm pretty much with PL. "HAHA holy shit these are racist stereotypes--WRITTEN UP AS D&D RACES!!! (Good thing we're so enlightened and not racist.)" is not super funny or clever.

Yes, Frank said that Justice is a virtue and that it's close-ish to Honesty, but if you're looking for a virtue that actually IS honesty you won't find it.

What do you guys mean by siloing?

What a surprise.

No worries.

I was addressing sigma, not you. I don't disagree with your point at all.

Where does it say that zombies can't be polymorphed? I don't see that anywhere in the Baleful Polymorph text, the Zombie template text, or the Undead type text. Anyway so the process caps out at a 16HD zombie cat after fully five castings of Animate Undead and four castings of Baleful Polymorph. And...

Except even at level 1 combats are over before three rounds is up. And they're spending a truly insane amount of resources to do so. At level 1, color spray, sleep, and silent image win entire encounters at the cost of one spell and some non-consumable actions. If you have the entire party spamming ...

Because it turns out that occasionally feeling "Aww, bummer" can be good for the game . Almost nobody is actually looking for a system where their actions are 100% successful and their effects are 100% predictable. This means that sometimes they will be bummed because the unpredictable eff...

Are you guys telling me that rather than dismotivating people, having obsolete options that they've once outgrown on the character sheet actually encourages and excites people? I thought I was fairly explicit that it does indeed dismotivate people, but that alternatives also include dismotivational...

How do you get four? I know there's one spell slot you start with, plus one for high Int plus one for school specialization, but where does the fourth come from?

True. I think a lot of my observations are kind of tuned to a classful system that makes D&D-esque assumptions about how power growth should work.

the core of game design is ensuring there is no dominant strategy Eugh. No. There is ALWAYS a strategy that is maximal, by being better than equal to or incomparable to every other strategy. In most games, for combat at least there is actually a finite possibility space. There's finitely many possi...

There's gonna be some unhappiness no matter which of the options presented we choose. The big problem is that there is a tension between having a big pile of tactically distinct options, which we like, and having a game that most players can easily wrap their heads around, which we also like. There ...

I'm trying to think how much of a difference it could ever make. So, we're assuming that monsters have 6-7 HP per level. So, at level 10, monsters have 60-70 HP and your evocations to 1d10 + 45. So it always takes exactly two hits to drop the monster, no matter how you roll. Actually, even if you gi...

Wait, hang on, "by one die size", do you mean going from 1d6 to 1d8? So evocation would do 1d8 + 20 at level 5, and 1d10 + 40 at level 9, and 1d12 + 60 at level 13? Or am I missing something? I just... I really dislike your thing where you deliberately set out to make giant static damage b...

Go Princess Bride on them. Kidnap a Skullstone princess and make it look like Coral dude it.