The Gaming Den

NWN1 is amazing, to be honest. I would actually be fine with them just making the following changes: -character faces don't all look like they have a weird moustache when they aren't being highlit (ie "adjust the lighting/shadow engine") Apparently they're making zero changes to the graph...

Haven't seen it yet, but the fact that the writer/director is running around less than a week after release going 'Well, actually, what the film means is X, Y, Z.' is a terribly bad sign. I've spoiled myself rather thoroughly on the film (and barring a few surprises, it lives down to my expectations...

James Jacobs has said that, but the original author was Wolfgang Bauer. We know the original damage was much, much lower, but not really a lot else. I mean, enough to know that some people didn't expect it to be a problem but that fits the larger pattern of them expecting people to ignore what the ...

Magic missile still isn't great. You're better off with utility spells (longstrider, expeditious retreat, detect magic, etc), trying to break the RNG with Shield (or Protection from Evil and Good, which is equal to Blur if the creature type is on the list). Even mage armoring up and waiting to cast ...

Honor is cultural. Unless it's spelled out somewhere what honor is in Golarion, then it could be almost anything. It's not a stretch to think that honor includes humans offering fawning submission to divine authority, I see that attitude in a lot of D&D material. This is not to say that the enc...

So, Beamdog is releasing a Neverwinter Nights expanded edition, and I'm a bit baffled as to why. The IE games can coast along without graphics improvements, thanks to the scale and isometric view. This... just looks like ass. https://www.beamdog.com/products/neverwinter-nights-enhanced-edition I get...

Then go back and dig those fuckers up. The only issue is that your DM might insist that they're Zombies because they didn't decompose enough but, honestly, if a DM doesn't want you to pull this shit they'll find a reason. Or just nerf Animate Dead. Get a big black cauldron. Do the same thing to the...

I don't think this works, at all. If the object is moved more than 10 feet from where you cast this spell, the glyph is broken, and the spell ends without being triggered You're going to have to do a lot of contortions to prove that bags of holding, teleportation or anything else doesn't count for m...

I mean, let's not overlook Fighting Style: Archery here. There is that- the moronic 'bounded accuracy except when we forget' poster child. Realistically, archer +sharpshooter is just flatly better than great weapon master. Mitigating the penalty (and archery in general mitigating taking a feat rath...

that... isn't the point. It wasn't even your point, since it wasn't on your own damn list of stuff you think the game is 'conflating' by having separate complex systems for them. Which I hope at some point you realize is a stupid fucking thing to say. Combat wasn't even under discussion until you ra...

Voss, maybe it deserves it's own topic, but, long-story short, Shadowrun is simply too cluttered and incoherent for it's own sake. It aims at a group doing criminal heists while conflating physical, virtual, astral and vehicular action. In practice, though, it doesn't pull if off, because each sub-...

That's actually part of my point. If you're thinking of these feats as pure DPR maximizing, you're kind of missing how big that -5 is in this system. Of your two real bonuses (stat and prof), -5 is all of one at its maximum value, and almost half of the total of the two (+11). A 20th level character...

Voss, maybe it deserves it's own topic, but, long-story short, Shadowrun is simply too cluttered and incoherent for it's own sake. It aims at a group doing criminal heists while conflating physical, virtual, astral and vehicular action. In practice, though, it doesn't pull if off, because each sub-...

A bumbler is someone who fails a lot. If you're failing at your job even 25% of the time, you're likely going to get fired (or pressured until you quit, in places where that isn't an option). Now put a group of people in constant life or death situations. Being a bumbler for mundane stuff (which is ...

2. Nerf Sharpshooter and Great Weapon Fighting and replace the "-5 penalty, +10 damage" with "-X penalty, +2X damage" where X is your proficiency bonus. I went with "choose your penalty up to your proficiency", possibly that's stronger if you actually know the enemy's ...

He didn't actually claim to like the game. The game doesn't have a lot to it, but since anything they had would be crap, it's not the point against it that it ought to be. Basically ANYTHING you come up with will be better than what they came up with, so by making you come up with so much stuff, it'...

Point buy. People who insist on lol!random for stats can go fuck themselves. In fact, let everyone roll, and force the worse set of stats from the group on the people who insist on random. I've seen people hand out bonus feats at level 1. Aside from a few trap options, this isn't bad, since it actua...

I think we are seeing more and more games doing the "math" right, or, accomplishing what it says on the tin with coherence. This gets clear if we compare modern games like Blades in the Dark or The Sprawl to any edition of Shadowrun, for example. I'm not sure why you think those first two...

Xanathar's Guide to Everything has 17 pages of names and only names. That's all you really need to know about how bullshit it is. 17 pages of names . It's worse than that. A full third of the book is random crap tables. It's a 120 page book masquerading as a 192 page book sold at the price of 320 p...

I noticed that the targeting reticle stayed centered, suggesting that there aren't seperate controls for arm and torso movement. Nothing really moves. The right arm laser fires from the same point every time, blazing off a weird angles depending on where the enemy is, the enemy mech legs pump the s...

Sure, by having 30+ books rather than about 5.

Maybe. It needs a lot of work and tuning. The HUD inside the mech shouldn't be getting motion blur from the thing turning, and the weapons frankly suck ass. Watching a moron in a Shadowhawk get hammered by wandering into increasingly spawning groups of enemies and somehow survive getting pounded for...

Ah, Japan: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42275875 Apparently some folks were feeling traditional and decided to basically re-enact a plot from a Edo era murder story. except for real. It's got it all: roadside ambush, the driver stumbling off wounded, inheritance at stake, even murder-suicide w...

* But back to those problems, because that's more interesting than this shoddy class. One of the goals I was trying to hit was for the shapeshifter class to be versatile, able to change role - both for thematic reasons and to be a non-caster that doesn't run on auto-pilot. It's not that hard; the s...

What he seems to be implying is that he's claiming it's the fastest sales because it's the shortest time between when a D&D book has gone on sale and when it has appeared in a book sales list. But that doesn't actually mean anything other than that a lot of book lists update semi-continuously t...