The Gaming Den

Those are the worst parts of 3.5. Andy Collins alterations to Freedom of Movement, Holy Word, Shapechange, etc were idiotic changes. I think it is possible that spells like Wraithstrike and Shivering Touch were intentionally broken, and were included to sell books. Well, the freedom of movement cha...

The boring factor is exacerbated by the fact that there are really only 5 monsters with different skins, and a few minor tweaks. You may care briefly that kobolds can shifty as a minor action, but after a while, you realize that you're always going to be fighting kobolds in different masks with big...

Ah, yes, I did manage to find the tables. I suppose that's okay, but I still prefer hitpoints based off of race to hitpoints based off of "role." I like the 4E system a bit better, since it focuses on what the monster actually does instead of something arbitrary like creature type. I mean...

Is anyone else disgusted by the lack of customizability of pretty much anything? Want to make a new monster? You can't; there's no HD or anything. Want to make a new magic item? You can't; there aren't any rules or anything. Want to have a familiar? LAWL NOOB THAT COULD BREAK TEH GAME. Actually the...

I'd like to point out that the amount of radiant stuff a cleric gets is lamesauce. What if I wanted to play... pretty much anything that isn't LG? Yeah, it's heavily slanted towards good clerics. You'd think evil clerics should be tossing out necrotic damage. I'm okay with paladins doing a lot of r...

It would be exactly the same as using a shield, so I don't understand your complaint. My complaint is that shields don't really work well either. Basically sword and shield doesn't start to get good until you've got at least a +2 shield. Before then, the +2 to AC just isn't worth much. It's pretty ...

The easiest route would be to just let the weapon give you a shield bonus modified by its enhancement bonus, with the option of choosing which one you wanted to use for attacks. I really don't like the idea of using the enhancement bonus much because then it turns the style into something that's go...

Disarm as a near epic manuever... wow... that's pretty lame.

Its good, but not that absurdly broken. It isn't assured, even against normal monsters. (You can cap out the modifier at 10 if you really try), which means with solo monsters, who are +5 to save all the time, are down to a -5, so they go from a 80% to save to a 30% chance. (And you're at 28th level...

Well apparently based on my browsing of the WotC boards, they've figured out a way to break 4E already. It involves the wizard's orb mastery + the sleep spell, with a wis maxed wizard. orb mastery causes the target to take a penalty to his saves equal to your wisdom modifier for one spell effect. So...

I guess what I'm trying to say is that one of the primary benefits of 4e, easy monster generation, is easily accomplished in 3.x with houserules and an experienced Dm. Note that I acknowledge it is still a fault in the game. However, I think it would be significantly more difficult for a Dm to inje...

Probably true. I just don't like that the concepts can't be reconciled... that you can't be a npc quickly, which works the same way a pc does. Well they can. It's basically called 2nd edition AD&D. It was so easy to create a fighter there, because they had no interesting abilities and it was ju...

Hmm. This, for me, is like your problem with spellcasters ruling everything in 3e. If someone is a wizard, that means he should do x, y and z (whatever those are), in whatever fashion that wizards do things. I really don't like the idea that your wizard does things *this* way, and has *these* abili...

I never really saw spellcasters as controlling everything. They did get all the interesting non-combat stuff, but I always assumed that if Conan can be followed around by a wizard, then the 3e Fighter can take Leadership and do the same. I mean, even taking Leadership means that you don't have to b...

I can't justify that an actual Demigod only gets a few uses of a power only marginally better than the one he got at 1st level, or that GP = magic items and if you find a gold mine your wealth levels don't increase. That's just lame, and I'll just play Neverwinter Nights if I don't want to play an ...

I've heard more people praising the wonders of exception-based design, so I'd just like to ask: Seriously, what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Are they referring to the bit where the basic rules look pretty simple, and every single thing that exists then has its own separate "I break the r...

The problem is that every martial ability is just a different mechanic for doing damage and every spell is a flavor rewrite (and slight mechanical difference) of the same four status effects. Yeah, I agree that 4E did it badly. But I don't necessarily thinking the base thinking was bad, only that t...

My friend downloaded a PDF of it...he says there's nothing significant to differentiate a wizard from a warrior. The only real difference is the flavor text. Well, the two seem more similar than ever because the mechanics have been unified and made more balanced. For one, the saves to defenses thin...

The phane is apparently worse. I'm not sure, because I didn't fuck around with epic shit in 3rd, but apparently it was capable of crazy shit. Now? Now its just a weird, smokey cat-centaur thing that zaps people with rays. It can't even kill a 1st level human guard in one round without spending an a...

Yeah, really it seems that they screwed up the monsters alot. Despite the potential for them to give monsters some interesting abilities, like the hobgoblins and kobolds in playtest that legitimately did cool shit, the most of the higher level monsters do crap. The saddest example is the swordwing. ...

And not just that, they have a sidebar that says how to deal with players that think their level 25 wizard with an 26 Int should be able to solve it, by allowing them to make an Intelligence check. Of course, because it's supposed to be a hard puzzle and the player's level 25, the book tells you to...

So is Sleep still amazing? Not really. It's actually not bad though compared to the higher level spells, since sleep is one of the few spells that can make people actually unconscious (and thus vulnerable to a combined CDG nuke by your entire party). The problem is that for sleep to work, you have ...

Also has anyone else noticed that not too many things are immune to sleep anymore? You can totally cast sleep on a spectre, a skeleton, or a flesh golem now.

For that matter, the difference between a Paragon and an Epic tier Guardian Shield is basically nothing as far as effects go: all you get is a frankly bullshit increase in range . But the difference in "cost" is tremendous . It's seriously 3 million gp, enough to purchase another Epic tie...

That's depressing. From what I have seen so far, rituals seem like the most interesting abilities in the game. Many powers and feats are just number juggling abilities. It seems as though they took the most fun parts of 3e and slapped a price tag on them, so that they won't be used. ... Yeah, I rea...