The Gaming Den

erik wrote:If I could spend a couple grand to get a dufflebag that could hold a dozen full dufflebags, I'd wonder "why bother?" I mean it'd be only for the interdimensional aspect, not because it is actually that useful to me.

Are you kidding? I'd call $2k for a Handy Haversack a ridiculous bargain.

They're pretty broad, but I've wondered whether Affects Self / Affects Others / Affects Environment / Summons Things would be a good split. In terms of the conceptual space, it seems like a division with reasons to want any of them over another. It would rely on some mechanical backing, though - sel...

The claim that blink can end with the subject on the Ethereal plane. Ok, come on, this is a pretty blatant straw man. Objects are not the same as creatures in D&D. Things affect them in different ways. And in particular, something ceasing to be affected when it leaves your possession is not the...

Referring to DCs in a level-based way doesn't inherently make it crap, although I have very little confidence that Paizo won't use them in the lazy treadmill way that's obvious. What does make it crap is how small the differences between difficulty types are - seriously, 8 points between trivial and...

I was expecting a lot of these feats to be crap, as many of the PF1 feats are, but "+1 to a single attack roll on a critical success" is even more amazingly crap than I was expecting. Even if you can give it to your party, that's still pretty lousy.

A system for a scope of play that few games do well, done well. And decoupled enough from the rest of 5E that it can be easily ported to other systems or used stand-alone. I would totally buy a 5E book to steal a good system for: * Kingdom level play * Invention, with interesting and non-arbitrary d...

Taking a guess, if I had to sum up PF2 mechanical design in one sentence, it will be " Everything gets a mechanical widget, but don't expect those widgets to be in any way balanced or useful". Being a pirate needs widgets, of course. Disliking ale, often wearing red, or being surly might n...

So my pathfinder party found a crystal ball with telepathy at level 7. Teleport is nerfed, so hanging on to it for scry-and-die isn't as effective as it would normally be. Is it still worth trying to hang on to for spying & telecommunications, or should we cash it in for 35k worth of stuff we c...

Teleport doesn't have a shunting clause Huh, thought it inherited that from Dimension Door, but on closer inspection no. Seems like the most plausible result would be making arrival "off target" (as per the result), or counting it as a false destination (under the "has been so comple...

Build walls on the Ethereal Plane side of your lair. Now, effects like magic missile won't be able to harm you on the Material Plane, because force effects extend from the Material to the Ethereal and those ethereal walls will provide total cover. Similarly on the base-building side: Tired of havin...

Also, let's be serious for a minute, imagine what you could do with, instead of 300 3rd level spells, 300 DIVINATIONS. In theory, a hell of a lot. In practice ... maaaybe, but it's highly dependent on MC, and requires either annoying all the other players or having enough time to do it between sess...

Judging by Starfinder, it probably will be more balanced than PF1, but in a crappy way - non-casters will be similar to now but with lower numbers, casters will get the nerf-bat big time. They'll still be more powerful than non-casters, but neither one will have any ability to jump the rails or be a...

So if I'm understanding it, you can roll N times for each skill check? Not per scene? In that case, you could speed them rolling mechanic up a lot, while keeping the same math, by doing two things: 1) Just use d10 instead of d100. 10% granularity is plenty for DCs that are being made up on the fly a...

It's better than the Shifter, no doubt, but the Synthesist primarily just has build-time versatility, not in-play versatility. Any of the latter it has comes from also being a caster. What I'm saying though, is that even if you had a version of the Synthesist that could change its evolutions at will...

The shifter pisses me off more than most of Paizo's fails, because I really fucking wanted a pure shapeshifter class. That sounds fun as hell to play, and it's something that, oddly, D&D has never really delivered (Wildshape Ranger -> MoMF -> Warshaper is close, but it's a lot of book-keeping an...

Not gonna lie, abilities like that make 5E a little more palatable to me. More so than 4E, despite being a worse-constructed system than 4E. Because at least in 5E I could amuse myself by doing some broken shit, and the char-gen is less work. Re: Illusions as damaging spells. You could do that, it j...

As someone who plays in a 5e game, it is not easy to blame the GM/players for the bad rules. "Expert" characters perform worse than untrained people with the worst possible stat like, 10 or 20% of the time. It's fucking stupid if my 19 Int wizard has to ask the goddamn fighter how a spell...

There's a number of people that really don't like talking or even hearing about the game system being less than perfect. If it produces less than perfect results, but it might plausibly be because the group was playing it wrong, that's not so bad. But having it known that the system is definitely fl...

Well, if they want to know if Tome stuff is balanced alongside Pathfinder, it's not, and if they're saying it's much stronger than most Pathfinder classes, it totally is. This is true though. I like the Tome stuff, but you can't just toss (most of) it in, you really need to go all-Tome. Or have a t...

There is a somewhat cheesy Teamwork trick you can pull with an animal companion that shares your square (either because you ride it or it's tiny). Escape Route lets you completely avoid AoOs for moving.

Great for familiars with the Valet archetype.

IIRC, the dot ranks had titles, like at Matter 4 you were an "Adept" of Matter and at Matter 5 you were a "Master" of it. And IME, people did use those terms IC when it came up. Given that a number of distinctive abilities like "can make portals" are impossible before a...

I just saw the preview scene with Vulcan, who's apparently recast himself as the American god of guns, and I have to say that he should probably be up there with JC, given how the gun nuts are a death cult that out-human-sacrifices the Aztec empire and everybody just accepts that as how we live now...

I'm betting it's because it's easy to write for PbtA's non-system, and easy to get newbies to give it a shot since you can elevator pitch the entire game. Yep. Easy to write up, and doesn't require as much familiarity with the setting from the players, since the archetype sheet serves as somewhat o...

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=426850 It appears to say the opposite on that very page. If multiple prevention and/or replacement effects are trying to apply to the same damage, the controller of the creature that would be dealt damage chooses the order in which to...

Somebody looked through the char-gen rules and made a couple of test characters at forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?802216-Eclipse-Phase-Second-edition-incoming!&p=21079270#post21079270 (URL tag doesn't work for some reason, causes the post to be blank). The results do not look good - much less comp...