The Gaming Den

Quickie: Reading the 4e DMG, I found that while the XP per encounter chart only shows you precalculated values for 4,5 and 6 person parties, it quite explicitly says how to calculate things for smaller or larger groups. Has anyone tried running the Same Game Test on 4e? Nearly everyone has built-in ...

Star Pact gets an absolutely sickeningly powerful ability: Accursed Shroud. It has to reroll every successful attack it makes and take the second result so long as it remains cursed, and AFAIK you can't uncurse yourself except by dying (or rather, dropping below 0 hp, which kills monsters). Star Pac...

I just love how Pelor will reject Lawful Good clerics, but Unaligned ones are fine by him. Especially the way it's not just a side effect of the new alignment system, but an actual example they give. He likes normal people and good people. Crazy good and lawful stupid are madmen that he just doesn'...

I just love how Pelor will reject Lawful Good clerics, but Unaligned ones are fine by him. Especially the way it's not just a side effect of the new alignment system, but an actual example they give.

I just found this while paging through Equipment. Dimensional Shackles, a 17th level item. Long and short of it: Str OR Dex vs. Reflex, but requires combat advantage. On a hit, they are Restrained (which means they can't move from the square they're in), and they also can't teleport or anything else...

Any time you have different resource management systems, you're going to have situations where one character is better than another. The only way to fight that is to give everyone the same resource management systems. And frankly, I'm not convinced that it would even be desirable to have a situatio...

That seems like a good idea, Frank, but I'd hesitate over some of those specific implementations. Leviathan, Promethian, and Transhuman all seem good, but in a mixed group I think Vampire, Witch (maybe) and Lycanthrope might be problematic. In a party, what the Vampire refill method might well lead ...

Yep. If you're an adventurer - what are you going to do with your money that's more important?

I'm not gonna defend the 4E magic item system though.

Maybe he would get disability services for his autisms and give up writing for a tech job? Huh? There's no evidence at all to suggest Lovecraft was autistic, other than the mistaken notion that he was some sort of recluse who communicated only by mail (propagated because we still have most of his l...

HERO System can do this well; just mandate that everyone buy Multiform, and you're pretty much done. Well, OK, Multiform and a few life support powers so that they don't need to breath/sleep/etc.

I'm not sure that really works. If a 5th level fighter has a 25% chance of beating an animated object, and a 5th level barbarian has a 25% chance of beating an animated object, both of them working together most likely have better than a 50% chance, but that seems to be what you're saying.

I do like this idea, but if it's gonna go anywhere, you REALLY need to rework the afterlife. It's not that hard for people in the D&D world to figure out "oh snap, if I worship Asmodeus, my afterlife sucks, better worship Pelor." Nor does it really cost Asmodeus anything to offer his w...

I should probably have said "ideal" instead of "best." You raise a very good point about the difficulties inherent in the 4th man test, I now agree that it's too intensive to be done with a sufficient degree of accuracy to be worthwhile, as compared to just a lot of work to do. I...

Well, I agree that what you describe would be incredibly hard to do, but would also be the best way to test it. The question, I guess, is whether the conclusions would be stronger (enough stronger to be worth the trouble) than the single-character tests, if one did a more limited form of the 4th-man...

The "ideal" way to test, I think, would be to make a default party of 3 characters of good but straightforward classes/builds (in the sense of - not dependent on having specific other characters in the group or on highly skilled playing), and then throw them up against challenges hard enou...

A few suggestions: We can't really evaluate how balanced this is without knowing what it gives up over generalists. How do generalists work in your homebrew? 1) Do you really need the condition that if you win by 5 or more, the spell fizzles, if you win by 4 or less, it's inhibited? Consider intead ...