The Gaming Den

From what I can remember, all the monsters were scary, in that if you met (say) a harpy you'd have to roll to see if you ran away in fear. That seemed very much not-fun to me, and also (again, unless I'm mis-remembering) you got no benefit for having defeated the monster previously. Thus you could k...

Its possible (2% chance) that your first encounter in the jungle is a CR 8 tyrannosaurus. You will very likely be level 1. So your TOA game could be "dicked over by NPC, town seems cool, TPK". It recommends that you are 1st-6th level for the hexcrawl portion of the game, and that you star...

My favorite example is a gang of Frost Giants that will explicitly attack the party if they refuse to answer their questions, but I saw some of the 5e fans complaining about Zombie Girallons. I actually quite like the idea of the Frost Giants encounter - they've basically wandered in from a complet...

The designers of Tomb of Annihilation always seemed to take the opposite approach to how I'd have done it, right from the start. From what I can remember, my reaction went something like this: Me "Great, an adventure set way outside the Sword Coast, where we can play Chultans trying to restore ...

Part 4: Blood for Blood The Barbarian King, on the other hand, is a joke. His WILL save is better than the Barons (+8) but he has no ranged offense. His artifact sword has a weird trait in which it dispels any, “any offensive effect once only as it first takes effect on the sword’s wielder.” Note t...

Yeah, you open up the book and get slapped on page 7 with this bizarre Fighter1/Rogue2/Cleric3/Wizard20/Archmage5/"Epic4" CR 45 monstrosity of a statblock. The FR sourcebook came out before the Epic Handbook / "D&D Jokebook" was released, so they mostly punt on the details o...

Frankly, 5e's "quasi-natural language" format is a crime against rules design, having all the repetitiveness and rigidity of 4e's heavily-keyworded system without the benefits of actually using lots of keywords and all the excessive verbosity of 1e's freeform monster abilities without the...

RI like the example of the 3e wyvern and the 5e wyvern . Huh, looks like Pathfinder has changed most of the stats of the 3.5e Wyvern (including changing its Int from 6 to 7 for some reason) but its CR remains 6. Looking at that 2d6 Con poison (initial and secondary) in 3.5 I'm really glad Pathfinde...

The Rokugan Campaign Setting is a 3rd party d20 book and was published a mere two months after D&D 3rd edition’s Oriental Adventures . The entire book basically comes off as an attempt to correct what the authors felt Oriental Adventures “did wrong”. I hadn't realised the two books came out so ...

Personally, though, I'm leaning towards the question of killing orc babies being less important than the question of, regardless of how you answer that, did you answer that at the beginning of the game or waited until the PCs found some orc babies to kill or not. Assuming the "you" in thi...

Also, there was no equivalent to the New World, and so no reason to sail out of sight of land. I'm not very familiar with 7th Sea, but I was aware the nations were basically proxies for European countries. I'd always assumed there was a New World bit as well. It had never occurred to me that someon...

We also get a skill for miming (Pantomime), yes, I’m serious. Pantomime is its own thing, it's not miming. I said it was miming, because that's exactly what the skill description says it is. It's the author's fault they don't know what Pantomime means. :( OK, now I've learned something, so I suppos...

We also get a skill for miming (Pantomime), yes, I’m serious. Pantomime is its own thing, it's not miming. Since a pantomime typically includes singing, dancing, comedy and (bad) acting, as well as cross-dressing, then the Pantomime skill is clearly overpowered. It replicates four other Perform ski...

This may be a bit of a double-post, but how much Nordic stuff is in Frostburn? That tends to be the most prominent "cold lands" based culture with which D&D designers and fans have any familiarity. Although I own the book I haven't cracked it open in a while and cannot really remember...

The other thing it wants to do is to get me to buy in to the idea that we should call all distinctively cold adventuring locations “The Frostfell.” in the same way and to the same degree that sometimes we refer to subterranean adventuring locales collectively as “The Underdark.” Finally I've realis...

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:Fun book, if pedantic.

Thanks, pedantic is just what I was looking for.

The pathfinder book does a reasonable job of integrating the weather rules with the skill system, but ignore the equipment rules. Nice to see Frostburn not only includes equipment but also remembers feats.

I did find some third-party content for system, including Resident Evil and Silent Hill. I have the d20 version of Fantasy Flight's Nocturnum. Some parts of it are great, but most of it isn't (and it pretty much makes up its own mythos rather than building upon the classic elements, which annoys so...

I think the key word here is "unprotected". Thanks for the reply. Is "unprotected" defined anywhere? The rules make a lot more sense if you can avoid problems by wearing a hat and coat, but that also makes the rules seem pretty pointless, barring odd cases such as having just br...

So, I added the hot and cold weather rules to my fantasy heartbreaker, which basically involves a cut and paste from Pathfinder, which I assume was a cut and paste from D&D 3rd edition. To add a tiny amount of value I decided to include the Celsius equivalents alongside the traditional Fahrenhei...

Warlocks need at least 11 Intelligence and at least 9 Psychic Talent. Higher than the Sorcerer (or Elementalist), who needs 9 for each, and the Mystic, who needs 9 for Psychic Talent and doesn't require Intelligence. So, more restrictions than the other magical types, but not by that much. Assassin...

I seem to remember the warlock has very stringent ability score requirements, so stringent that my brother actually wrote a simple dice rolling progam to generate his character for him.

The lesson that Dragonlance’s writers want you to take away from this was that the gods were totally not at fault for the Cataclysm, that the Kingpriest and the Istaran government were not wicked men but people who were too Good-aligned for their own good in spite of all their atrocities, that the ...

What's the purpose of a game element the pcs can't interact with ? Why does Paizo pretend they're writing game while it's so obvious they want to write novels ? It seems to be what their audience wants. Presumably GMs rather than players. "A ton of lore for interesting characters from the sett...

Radiance House did their own version of the binder for 3rd edition, and updated it for Pathfinder i.e. gave it some more fiddly bonuses to keep track of. Their vestiges seemed to me to be a lot more flavourful than the WotC ones (and you can bind two at once at 4th level, not 8th). The pathfinder ve...

I've got the new-version Dragon Warriors version "Prince of Darkness" published by Mongoose, which expands on the "kingdom" a bit. It also has the adventure in it, but I don't remember it being as bad as the version in the original gamebook. Maybe they improved it; I'll have to d...