The Gaming Den

Example: evil tyrant gets power to indulge in weird whims they'd not be able to otherwise. OTOH, the only thing keeping them in power's that they actually do things better than everyone else. See also: Mao, Stalin. You assume that they a)were getting power for that reason (instead of being initiall...

"Nazism == evil" blows up any chance of elves being racially CG. Actual nazist elves (drow and FR extremists) are unambigiously Evil in the settings. Stabbing people in the face on suspicion of evil's actually what's being done with each and every dungeon clearing ever. Speak for your own...

Wrong. That is complete crap. By this logic, youyr LE tyrant gets kicked off the team because his rule is *better* than that of a CG ruler, and thus is "good" by some definition...thus, he is a traitor to the cause of Evil. I agree, that there is no "cause of Evil". I disagree, ...

Acting in self interest is predictable. Acting in the interest of whatever real or imagined crap such as say... thinking you're evil, even if you aren't and stabbing you in the face... not so much. DnD evil =/= acting in self-interest in any actual setting or book definition I care to remember. To ...

Arguing that they're the same, except one side is more predictable reduces "good" and "evil" to "red" and "blue"...which isn't an RPG I'm terribly interested in. It works fine for board games and video games, though. I feel like this too. If I want to run an ...

In official settings you're not supposed to really push the evil back or make the world better in the long term for the same reason the villains suffer from chronic inability to suceed in their plots - because the Status Quo Is God. This is not necessarily (and, IMO, should not be) so in specific ga...

Also, it'd be cool if it ended with Death of Superman. Because "Holy shit, something permanent actually happens!" Really, the lack of any permanent or world-changing things makes it like 4E, every day is the same (wake up, beat villain up, save the world again, go to bed). Superman didn't...

I placed (Greater) Anticipate Teleportation on most spell lists. This alone can protect most NPCs that have a reason to fear scry&fry. Tome rule about scrying and teleportation being blocked by sufficiently thick layer or solid material is also good.

I would like to echo Kaelik, but go further: position 1 is STUPID. It isn't interesting, fun or cool, it's DUMB. If you claim that a full quarter of your cosmology is delusional, your setting sucks and I don't wanna play in your games. Signing up with evil side in, for example, Warhammer (any varia...

If evil gets a shit deal in the afterlife (patently false in default D&D, as Frank has said) then one has to wonder why anyone in D&D turns evil at all. This isn't like the real world, we actually know the D&D gods exist because they occasionally come around in some form and smack shit ...

But Team Evil does not really get equal benefits, except, maybe, in 3.X Forgotten Realms. While "good" afterlife in Planescape and its derivatives often isn't exactly that great, if you go to Lower Planes after death you're pretty much assured of being turned into a lowly wretch that is ex...

When a good guy dies (assuming he's been a decent chap) he goes on to Happyland. When a bad guy dies, he gets dragged screaming into the pit of eternal torment and - wait; what? Why does he work for these people again? Because he's duped. Remember, his bosses are evil, and often specifically hate m...

SWEET! Now we can shell out another $20 for Pathfinder! Yeah. I wanted to like Pathfinder, but the game that seems to be made different for the sake of making it different = fail. Making lots of small, annoying changes without fixing any of the major underlying problems or even most of minor locali...

Interesting. Is Stanislav Bartoshevich a local? Because I notice some terminology in that rant that was made over here. Spot on. I'm a lurker here. Well, I was, since discovering the original Psychic Robot's critique of Pathfinder Beta and until now. Personally I would have word processored up such...