The Gaming Den

The easy way out of the the detect good and evil and the paladin stuff is that is they are defined relative to the person casting the spell or the deity that the paladin is representing. It's not that they are intrinsically evil, it's that they are evil to YOU. Of course is doesn't work with the ab...

This might be me being a dumbass but doesn't rlt destroy granularity so that your post-combat options are "fine, half dead, and all dead"? That seems like a problem. You certainly can't very well balance a series of encounters like a dungeon crawl this way because it is super swingy. Also,...

Once again I feel the need to remind everyone to get back not track. If people want to have the five millionth mundane superpower shitstorm make a new thread for that. Mundane characters at high levels is a shitty concept. This is not my opinion it is an imutable fact that I am stating for the reco...

Being higher level means that there is more things that you can do, and equally less things that you can do "if and only if the DM puts it in your mission rewards or mission preparation hooks for this session". -Username17 If we take "doing things" to mean "accomplishing go...

First level characters can't depose the evil king. They lack the necessary abilities to do that if the evil king has real political power. That's not the adventure you described. You described: besiege the evil capital city, crash the gates and then murder the devil king The adventure "De-Saur...

Because other than personal assurances from you that the "numbers" on that are very high, that could be a first level adventure. You are advocating the 4e paradigm, where high level adventures are just low level adventures with pallet swaps. The Kobold chief has been repainted as a Devil ...

So if we're defining high level play as "teleport into hell and murder the devil king" then pretty clearly high level play needs magic of some sort in order to show up to the high level adventure. I'm not sure why we can't say that high level play can also look like "besiege the evil ...

Long time lurker here. I felt compelled to add my two cents. I think that the most interesting thing here (although probably not the most useful) are the related ideas of metagame powers and powersource: protagonist because, honestly, that is usually what people mean when they say they want to play ...

Could somebody post a rapidshare link on /tg/ for me? I can't torrent (don't ask). Otherwise I can wait until I can buy it. Thanks either way and great job y'all.

So you think people will play tapeworms and sea anemones, bearing in mind that the habits and biology of both of these things are extremely well understood, as compared to, say, the society of millennium-old humans with pointy ears? I don't post here often but the amazing douche-baggery of this pos...

People steal electrical power lines. From substations running tens of thousands of volts. Yes, people regularly get turned into charcoal briquettes doing this. They still do it. Yet, somehow we don't stop using power lines. Also, you don't regularly see people stealing tanks. Either magical items a...

The range of of 1 mile a level is also pretty limiting. The spell is second level, so it's actually the work of an expert adventurer so it's not like you can make training schools to make them (and magic items of Whispering Wind are going to be expensive). And that's above and beyond the fact that ...

Whisper Wind is super inefficient compared to things like mirror towers or even smoke signal towers, or even just riders carrying messages. I mean, a 1st level spellcaster is not going to be a telecommunications hub with his ability to send just a few hundreds words per day. That really depends on ...

What is the highest level that one might expect to reach from wizard school? Why is this the level cap? Is there a way around this problem? It is clearly more efficient for the individual to go adventuring, however, there are also an awful lot of reasons why you wouldn't do that if you are just a du...

Vebyast: except even that's wrong. You're saying that a wizard can use his human capital to produce physical capital. Which is of course true. And it's actually really cool if the capital he creates doesn't depreciate. But it's still just capital. Technology is stuff that improves productivity by b...

How did Frank convince you that interacting with the physics of your world in a calculated fashion to produce a known result is not technological?

No, I meant the society, not the technology. Meaning, it's hero-driven. Heroes are the kings, or topple weak kings. Heroes are the wizards and priests. Gods are modelled after the greek pantheon, and are not omniscient or potent, but meddle for selfish reasons. If you're a wizard or cleric or some ...

You also have dicless systems (like Marvel Universe RPG) and card based systems. I don't have anything to contribute other than to point out that these thing also exist.

I'd rather go Iron Age, Greek mythology style. This has tremendous implications on what spells can reasonably exist, how world spanning (to say nothing of plane-spanning) your campaigns can be, literacy and how "free" you might expect your average dude to be. I would like to see what you ...

For me, there are two major issues that need to be dealt with before anything approaching a coherent world can be built. In the first place there is the question of how "enlightened" you want your world to be and in the second there is the question of how globalized you want your world to ...

This seems like there is a huge premium put on team play. That comes with all sorts of positives and negatives and I'm not going to say it is a bad thing but is there any way you could have a WoF without emphasizing the team quite so much?

Does the WoF system allow for forward thinking tactics (i.e. is there anything in the way of planing for the future) or is it an exercise in choosing the situationaly optimal option of those rolled each turn? Do maneuvers synergize with each other and if so how do you do that reliably? Or do you hav...

I hadn't considered magic items as an example of power (combat utility) as a transferable resource. That's a really good example, thank you. I need to think about this a little more.

What would you feel about a game where it was possible to trade class features and abilities like a resource (and this is supported by fluff) but the setting is such that you can't simply get whatever class feature you wanted at the market? Are there such games out there? Are they any good?

My settings never make a distinction between race and culture regardless of how globalized the setting is supposed to be. I should probably work on that.