The Gaming Den

A also like Rebecca Sean Borgstrom's designs better than anyone else's I can think of, but they have an unfortunate tendency not to be very playable (I'm hopeful that's an artifact of teaming up with other folks, and that someday I'll get my hands on a copy of Nobilis, and it will be awesome). This...

I mean random traps that are just inserted in the module in order to give trapfinders something to do and a reason to exist (and the only reason trapfinders exist is because random traps are inserted into modules to give them something to do). This is true; "Trapfinder" shouldn't exist as...

"wandering monster" traps are just fucking stupid. Is there a sort of trap I'm not aware of? Or are you talking about Wandering Monsters in general, which are not traps and are both realistic and good for gameplay? Ideally, traps should exist in two ways: *"Not Paying Attention"...

Doublepost

Even if this is balanced, I will not accept any onstensible "shapeshifting" that does not in fact give me the physical properties of the new form, i.e. I don't want to be lied to. If you don't want me to be able to turn into a dragon, just say that, don't hedge and say "sure, you can ...

Is this along the lines of Arctic/Desert/Jungle Druids and Urban Rangers, or something else?

If you pay close attention to the movements, different characters will fight with radically different styles. The attention to detail is actually really cool. Perhaps this is so, but couldn't that be encompassed by monk/fighter/rogue multiclasses? From another angle, while having a lot of variation...

Avatar: the Last Airbender has plenty of examples of different types of fire magickery without one form being simply better than another. You could separate them into different classes, but then you'd seriously need, like, a hundred classes (unless it's Avatar: the Last Airbender: the RPG, in which...

Limited character customization strikes me as a flaw. If me and my friend Bob both want to play fire mages, there should still be some things which set us apart. You could have customizable class features like the Tome Monk, but that's just moving the feats into the classes. That's what I think mul...

"Just making the classes good" is a goal kind of like "fix the economy" that everyone is for in theory, but as soon as you try to figure out the details of how to actually do it, people start screaming and holding the country hostage. But being difficult doesn't mean that it's a...

I still don't think optimization should be written out of a game. Nor should clever SoP's, for that matter. One of the most awesome things to do is to take a band of new (or coddled) players, start them at low level, and then throw vicious traps and ambushes at them (with sub-optimal but non-lethal...

I hate pre-game character optimization so much I would be satified only if it ceased to exist. I want to get into the game, not spend an entire "session" generating a character. Just make the classes good in and of themselves, and player's wouldn't need to optimize. 3) Remembering to take ...

For people that still want the "weak buffs" aspect of Bards, you could throw in the Syncopate ability to let them add cantrip-type (and maybe higher levels later) effects as a swift action when casting. So, you could be using a fascination spell, but also throw a Resistance effect on your ...

Our characters had been captured by sahuagin, and we were supposed to do things to impress them. Then they poisoned us and told us to make an antidote. None of us had any of the relevant skills. So the DM tells us what ingredients we have to work with, then starts threatening us with death if we do...

Unless the player declares some action for them... the characters are doing NOTHING. They have no mind or will of their own, they are moving only by the will and choices of the PLAYER, because they are fictional. This is true, but that does not preclude people establishing that "when I am in a...

I remember in my 1e / 2e games we used to establish the various SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) that would include mappiong/searching functions in dungeons, or standard camp setups for outdoors. Many of the people I game with and myself use SOPs (e.g. Prod-Listen-Open on doors, the classic tap...

Regardless of if the story is true or not, the fact is that your character is going to know things you don't, and it makes no sense to ask the player to know these things in real life to play his character effectively. However, you cannot completely divorce player skill from character skill; otherw...

I was was at an RPGA event and I saw a man almost cry because the DM was trying to get him to figure out how to make an antidote. Making grown men cry out of frustration is not a winner for a design goal. I think you've mentioned this incident before. The first time I thought nothing of it, but now...

Having spent like 3 hours looking for Darcy's keys yesterday, I'm gonna disagree with you on that. I totally have the ability to find them in other circumstances and I certainly spent enough time looking within the 5' square where they were located - but my efforts were focused on the incorrect pil...

So unless someone wants to present a convincing argument that such increases come at a greater than acceptable cost to Speed of Resolution, Verisimilitude, Clarity or something that actually matters - because "immersion" has nothing to do with the ruleset - then the old style system is fl...

I always find it interesting how these discussions always revert into balancing some hypothetical D&D: Mortal Kombat game in which the PCs are dueling with each other. And how utterly irrelevant that is to any game of D&D I have ever played. YMMV. This is not hypothetical; it's how I and th...

(looks at the Tome series, filled with abilities that require checks to use them) You'll need post some examples. I just checked the fighter, and it has all of one ability that requires a roll at all. That being said,if you do find examples of what's being discussed, it might result in changes to t...

This is making me consider playing Risk again. I don't like the game (too random), even having played in several times when I was a child, but the corporeal entertainment of tearing up a card and drawing on the board is attractive. It would seem reasonable to make the game "resettable": cr...

Spending XP is pretty bad idea, really: by RAW, you might get it back (because XP is a River, or so I'm told), but usually DMs either don't fully know the rules or don't want the extra work adjusting for loss of XP. Not sure about anything else that spends XP, but magic item crafting would do well a...

So, Legends & Labyrinths , made by The Alexandrian of "dissociated mechanics" fame, is out, and claims the backwards compatibility that PF lacks. Legends & Labyrinths features 100% compatibility with the advanced version of the 3rd Edition rules. This means that any stat block or m...