The Gaming Den

Grek wrote:If you are an Expert in a skill and roll a ten or less on your die roll, you can Take Ten to add 10 to your modifier at no extra cost.

A pretty interesting idea compared to my current +4 for specialization. Mind if I maybe steal it?

You know, the problem of random peasants being able to succeed on heroic tasks, and heroes being able to fail trivial tasks is pretty serious when your main randomizer is 1d20, skills go up by +1 per level and you are supposed to be well into the superhero realm by level 6. It caused me some conster...

Thaluikhain wrote: Dragon Warriors did the exact opposite, and called such spells "Direct attack". Indirect attack spells involved creating fire or something, which then affects the target (or not) normally, same as mundane fire would.

Yes, so far this seems to be the most appropriate suggestion, thanks.

I want to imply that the attack does not have a physical, tangible component that can be dodged or blocked normally. This includes mindscrew, illusions, magics like polymorphing others or curses for which you just need to have a target, radiation-like auras, and so on.

An unusual question for TGD. Can anyone suggest a single word to serve as name for the class of attacks that cannot be avoided by one's physical movement? I.e., putting unblockable/undodgeable - as is the case with many DnD powers like fear or other mental effects that simply affect the target - in ...

Wrong. Problems with "high-level DnD" as opposed to "mid-level DnD" were either perceived rather than real, or boiled down to obvious pieces of bad design that clearly aren't going to be fixed in PF2E. As about the perceived problem, 80% of the stuff that actually broke campaigns...

Oh hey look, don't you think that the ability to bypass damage resistance, and seemingly not even all of it, at level 19, about 16 levels after damage resistance starts appearing regularly, is awesome? Also, a class that is naturally suited to be a straightforward vehicle for noobs still totally nee...

They say they're monsters "easier to run", but from the examples this sure doesn't seem to be the case. Sure, the ogre, being a simple beatstick, is easy. But the redcap is very complicated for a level 5 monster. Also, holy HP inflation! The last time I posted into my own hearbreaker threa...

I've wanted to check if TGD has anything new to say about PF 2 and got another fucking orc baby discussion instead... Ultimately, once we have no need to stick to descriptions in the current DnD Monster Manual because DnD has crashed, this matter is simple. Fantasy settings with a lot of violence an...

If you're putting tits in your book, at least make them fapworthy. These aren't.

Also, in general, the bleached aesthetics and pictures looking as if someone spilled paint on the page weren't impressive in nWoD and they aren't impressive now.

Law and Chaos have little if any meaning in basic DnD, because Good and Evil are a separate scale, and that's what Law and Chaos were meant to serve as stand-ins for in books from where Gygax lifted the concept. In my own setting fey are Chaotic because they disagree with the precepts of Law, such a...

No, I just had nothing to do and no opportunity to run games for a few weeks, so that resulted in strange ideas. At the moment nearly all SoD/SoL abilities need to hit with two attacks to work, a hit on the initial attack gives some small effect, or the normal SoL effect for 1 round only, a hit on t...

The LMSD damage system is certainly better than the usual soak. But the main thing I'm getting from the discussion and my own contemplations so far is that abandoning hit points just isn't worth the titanic amount of work and hassle. The link for the current state of the rules if anyone is intereste...

And on soak. I don't know if the first edition of Shadowrun worked any differently from 20th Anniversary edition I used to check the mechanics. Soak there functions along the general lines already familiar to me, except with less rolls but more fiddly bits. The fundamental problem with it is that Sh...

We can look at the issue of one-shot abilities one-shotting people in the first round or not being able to do so from two angles. From the purely mechanical perspective, unless SoD/SoL abilities are nerfed in their applicability to the point where making them stick on an opponent of roughly equal st...

It's no secret that I've pretty extensively played and examined a heroic fantasy game which featured largely fixed (compared to damage amounts) hit points and soak, i.e. Exalted. It was constantly caught in the dilemma between making soak effectively second armor class (if your number is not high en...

I've abandoned this thread for rather longer than expected, because after we with my friends started doing actual playtesting I was occupied with that, and there were quite a few sweeping changes to the core. One of those changes is rather too sweeping, and I'd like to ask the Den's advice on it. Th...

That's probably the biggest issue with using d20 mechanics to simulate a fight like that - d20 spends most of its rule space evolving the ways in which stronger combatants can effortlessly skullfuck weaker combatants. It doesn't do a lot for situations like Monster Hunter, Dark Souls, and many othe...

All in all, reading the existing bits of information gives me no hope for any significant improvement in PF 2.0 whatsoever. (1) The biggest problem of 3.X/PF was crunch overload that made the game unwieldy to play, and doubly so to run, past level 7 or so. Generating a two-digit level character was ...

This is one of the key portions of the Masquerade: every group has to uphold the Masquerade for every group . So it isn't just that Vampires don't reveal the existence of Vampires, it's that Werewolves also don't reveal the existence of Vampires, and that fucking Hunters don't reveal the existence ...

(1) You need a full reboot, as was already mentioned in this thread. (2) That reboot needs to be based on whatever books/shows about supernatural critters are most popular at the moment, just like Masquerade was Ann Rice: The RPG before bloat and incestuous self-referencing set in. The old baggage h...

I don't think anyone, except maybe OSR grogndards, seriously want classes to set characters in stone. Even people advocating for shitton of narrow classes also mentioned having shitton of feats to customize them the last time I checked. To me personally the purpose of classes is giving the general i...

Does anyone want to talk about 'Leveling' and the pros and cons it brings to D&D? Leveling is a handy tool of handling character progression in a setting with massive power level differences between characters. Nearly ALL fantasy has massive power level differences between characters, I mean &q...

Does Weapon Immunity need to be a thing at all? It does. First "this monster is vulnerable to one specific thing, or maybe a few things, and superhumanly resistant at best immune at worst to everything else" is very common in fantasy. Second, damage resistances or even outright immunities...

(1)I don't see much problem with designing mass combat for DnD, as long as you accept the basic premise that you are not designing a system that allows tiny men to hold their own on the battlefield of heroes and titans, you are designing a system that allows heroes and titans to delete vast numbers ...