The Gaming Den

Home run! It's been interesting to go over them again. As a hot tip, using coloured backgrounds under compact and encoded information is poison, and you should not ever do that in your RPG project. Little tabs and stuff are fine, colour dots, bold headers, indents, plain dots, single dark line betwe...

#Ogres ; a digression. I'm curious, how does that work? I'm making something with very little similarity to D&D but it indeed has an ogre in the monster manual. Say an ogre has 30 HP and a two-target +1 to hit 3d6 melee attack compared to a starting character's 15 HP and single-target +1 to hit ...

And did I ever run into that in my day of N-S, Frank. Who was that said spell lists were murder? jt. Because spell lists were not murder, this is murder. Sure, spell lists could've often been improved with single line spell summaries, as found in the class spell list section of the 3e PHB, a short r...

They mostly carried large knives as a general tool. Knife to the liver is extremely lethal and completely debilitating from the start with pain. Turns out when the guy across the table at poker draws his 6-shooter, he has to cock it first, which upsets the aim, and that means you can stab him in the...

Y'all keep getting ahead of me. Forgive my small repeats of what others have said before in this thread, I'm writing these in rather short efforts through the day. [hr] On we go, woohoo. Hag had the decency to cover the shame of not being able to make the extensive classic hag powers happen at all, ...

It helped in oldschool D&D that fights weren't balanced at all, difficulty was largely player controlled and you could just roll through more fights or go deeper into the woods or dungeon to make use of your sudden power gains should they happen. 4e by comparison is very tight difficulty control...

You do have way too many mundane splits and could easily have more magic splits. The Berserker is basically a 3E barbarian. They have a big charge radius which helps to engage enemies. The Fighter is a master of weaponry; if you want to have a sword, an axe and a spear, and to alternate these weapon...

Story time, I did see a 5th level AD&D Party get themselves a Red Dragon, an act which in itself killed two PCs. They held it for about two levels, until one day the party got hurt and the dragon didn't, so on the way back out of the dungeon it killed them all and went home. They did wreck the p...

Cheers, Frank, good stuff. [hr] It does seem the long names here exist because they expected to be putting out five different monster manuals in five years, and wanted a whole stack of Orcs and Lizardfolk and various other things in each one. Traditionally that would've been giving them an actual na...

Capitulation Sometimes in a D&D game, it is very important that the PCs can surrender (even to monsters who they could have easily beaten). Far more often it is important that the monsters can, on account of they are losing all the time. Standards of practice around this need laid out at least,...

AD&D Holy Word would Kill 1-3 HD, Paralyse 4-7 HD, Slow 8-11 HD, and Deafen 12+ HD (for 50% spell failure). And they got that at 16th level, where it's OK. 3e Holy Word is first cast at 13th level, so Monte Cook made it CL-10 max to kill, CL-5 max to Paralyse, CL-1 max to weaken, and everyone el...

It is quite amazing that they definitely were hearing the complaints, and acting on them, and yet not ever dealing with the underlying problems. I can imagine it was some forum admin's job to check the forums and collect notes about specific reported problems, and then some junior developer's job to...

They should've really done a partial Alpha release before this, it got most of the stuff everyone hated out of the first edition. But you know, if something works amazing well for you, and is the entire reason your company exists now, why not change it?

Continuing. Cambion fight with a magical flaming sword, and drop a normal sword because at some point someone decided that element of post-combat insult to realism would save the day. Turtles all the way down, bad, bad turtles. They're not listed with the devils because a few of them are raised by d...

The rules around treasure (and the whole DMG) were written after the Monster Manual was finished, this whole book doesn't consider or mention treasure in any way. Much the same was true in 3e, a lot of monsters there are much better with some magic gear but 4e is much less an approximation of functi...

There was a good few books put out for 4e under their horrific GSL licence, right at the start. Almost every company that tried it put out one book, and then stopped, because they did not sell. Because 4e is a bad game, and the people who liked it were house ruling like never before. I'll do a "...

As a Swift Action, your responsive noun always allows you to use a Swift Action on your next turn, even after using an Immediate Action between turns.

My understanding is they genuinely had no data and no fucking idea what people did with D&D, and the development of 4th edition fell apart through arguments about their ongoing internal speculation on that matter. [hr] Orcus is the name of a demon lord who will screw you for breaking oaths. http...

This is a personal consideration of the 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual 1 Player's Handbook 1 Dungeon Master's Guide 1 [/size][/b] and the events surrounding their production which lead to them being the unremitting, eye-gouging, shitfest that they are. https://www.dandwiki.com/w/i...

I'll take a shot at 4e core, gotta justify all my notes on that development hell somehow.

A lot of your arguments there are kinda bullshit, Frank. It's like you're saying how you can't possibly have a modern RPG at all where the PCs can live in one jurisdiction and then maybe commit crimes in another one just by walking across a legal fiction on a map because BOOM, campaign over. ??? No....

But 328k in the US is not a big number, the US is fucking huge and heavily populated, they have 23 states with more people than my country. In NZ it's 5k supernaturals, including just 600 for Māori and 14 for Niueans. Niue has their own mythology, man, they probably need more than that. Fij...

A few advantages in a base rate of things existing in setting and adventure design as well as the shared world experience of playing the game. 1 per 1k for supernaturals is 328k in the US, 120k in Mexico, 37k in Canada, the population is growing in Mexico almost as quick as the US, most are a modest...

Roughly, mega-corps own other corps, which own other corps, which are composed of businesses of various sizes that do various things, or at least pretend to because they're still getting paid. Like, Mike Mearls is running D&D, and has a budget to do that with, which is as detailed for him as he ...

If you want old cold war, it was two trade blocks, the western world, and the eastern world. Both sides said any nukes used on their protectorate would end the world. Could've built one cobolt bomb each and saved a lot of money, but whatever. Note: Polymorph Any Object, by the rules, you can just en...