The Gaming Den

JonSetanta wrote:Eat ass.

I haven't encountered XP in years. We just level up when the story requires it. Please learn to read. And to clarify: "class xp" in this context is some pool of points you get that you use to purchase class features and feats. You still get normal xp for killing shit and doing all the thi...

Going back to the "XP-per-action" thing I've been pondering... Would something like "you only get class xp if you are in a situation in which you could not take 10 on skill checks" be a good starting point, perhaps? Maybe something about being able to gain class xp from actions t...

Hmm... fair enough.

And having your resource system be "the best one you can think of" or "the minimum (but best) required" seems like the obvious rational methodology to support that rather than "each class needs a unique resourcing system for the sake of difference alone even when nothing it...

I just want to say that using Essentia to create undead seems like a bad move. The idea is that if you want to keep your minions around, you have to invest some kind of resource into them to maintain them, which gives you less resources to invest in shooting dudes with magic. The important part of ...

Look, if the 1d3+8 person has other useful things they can do (I'm absolute shit for damage in my current game, but I buff people real good), then the reason that disparity is ok is because it never comes up. So I'm definitely still hammering out the kinks in this approach, but in general most atta...

...So now we have a random weakling Again, you assume that everyone at level X will be doing Y damage. That's dumb. And all that's ignoring the fact that you literally just added a character whose static damage isn't large compared to their variable aspect in order to justify the existence of rando...

Based on the way you asked the question, it was clear to everyone except you that you were talking about a system like D&D (because fireball and hit points ). You cannot claim that you were totes planning on changing hit points at this point. We can sit here and keep circle-jerking on the same ...

You keep looking at this problem in a vacuum as though the only damage anyone ever did ever is 40+2d6. Okay, so let's say you hit an asshole and he has 10 hp left. Is it so absurd to imagine that, in the same world in which the guy hitting for 40+2d6 exists, that another guy exists who has an attack...

Why are you assuming that every attack form ever would do exactly the same damage?

Gonna stop you right there. Why, because you're caught up on the notion that literally everything else has to stay the same when discussing changes to damage? Obviously if you change how damage works, going from an XdY paradigm to an XdY+Z paradigm in which X is typically a much smaller number, the...

Yeah, which proves that we can achieve the huge power disparity without having guaranteed two-hit kills within the same power tier. Guess I phrased it weird, but the "one hit if you're lucky, two if not, never three" is what seemed like a shitty thing to hardcode in. The precise numbers c...

If your concept is "you won't feel bad if you roll the badly" I know others have posited that position. I have not. I started with static damage, but found myself pondering whether or not my players would go along with that. I then modified my damage codes such that there is a ~10% varian...

Scaling your management game is all about aggregation and optional averaging. You work a specific farm you want to know crop yields and acrage and shit. But if you control the whole hex you just want to know average yield per farm and the number of farms. Harvest Moon: TTRPG Edition is a thing that...

So... what, it's impossible to envision a system for which the 2d6 in "40+2d6" is meaningful, so fuck the entire notion? I get that it's largely pointless in 3.5. But surely it isn't absurd to contemplate the idea further and what sort of system it could potentially reside in without feeli...

So I know I've read about the idea of a necromancer class that uses essentia for resource management, but has one actually been written?

The problem with tightening the variance is how big the bonus is. That example is borderline pointless because your damage variance is +/-14%, and is the same reason that base weapon damage becomes meaningless past the low levels. I normally shoot for about 10% variance when I do my damage codes. I...

You guys realize that static damage tends to be boring as fuck, right? People want the roll to matter. Yes, but you want to balance out the players' desire for the roll to matter with how much variance the mechanics can reasonably tolerate. Fireballs doing 10d6 means that it could be as much as 60 ...

Special Attacks: Dominate, Charm, Energy Drain, Run Away Special Qualities: Shapechange, Tongues, Telepathy, other crap. I think if you took a vaguely 4e approach to monster entries (in terms of listing attacks and what they do in combat), but also included non-combat stuff as a separate part of th...

But it also doesn't mean that they CAN be handled well. Any action sufficiently uncommon and sufficiently unimportant is, for those reasons alone, impossible to provide a good formal ruling for. At this point I think we reach the point of anecdotes. You say lifting capacity isn't terribly important...

And yet lets look at the thing you are complaining about here. A lack of detailed encumbrance rules worse, possibly a lack of maximum bench press/lift rules. Hell maybe even a lack of maximum push/drag rules. These are rules which even when they do exist are notorious for never being used, for bein...

But unlike the web question, it's a stupid question that doesn't matter (instead of a stupid question that does). I disagree. One of my big hang-ups about 4e was the lack of non-combat information for critters. If you are trying to at least reasonably model a world, it would be nice to know things ...

There would need to be a number you add +3 to . That is a good point. I guess Frank's solution of "every monster class has a baseline set of stats, modify by templates" is probably the best one, then. If you have stats at all, and the game uses them as a default for task resolution, then ...

On the flip side, if you simply make the stats completely disassociated with the number outputs (as 4e does), that's intellectually insulting and makes the game flail and fail when a Giant drinks a potion of strength or whatever. Couldn't you design mechanics that got around the lack of stats for m...