The Gaming Den

...Or the high level players all trained for 19, so upping it to 23 ruined their strategy. They have been playing that way from the day they were old enough to hold stones. Yeah, you're going to basically throw people off their game when you change the rules and they have to re-adapt strategies for...

Maybe I just have bad luck, but I had to endure three episodes where the 'heroes' are stupid, xenophobic pricks and that the authors thought that the height of comedy was Vulcans saying that humans smell bad. Maybe I was just spoiled by TOS and VOY, but I could just not imagine Savik, Spock, or Tuv...

Psychic Robot wrote:They can get rich off of these policies, so they support them.

Exactly. It's not about the economy, it's about lining their own pockets and trying to sell it to the people in some way that doesn't make them seem like the greedy money hungry bastards they are.

Gods are not worthy of worship if they are simply middlemen for power, especially when there are other characters in the party who are getting power some other way. The minute the party Wizard can tell your god to go screw himself, your setting starts to fail. Not really K. People who are good cler...

To be fair, RC2, thunderwave was a powerful At-Will at higher levels because you could push several monsters outside of move range, especially with the help of some magical items. Very nice in combination with dazing / slowing / immobilizing / prone / blinding, but as Pixels pointed out since most ...

Murtak wrote: You can't say the same for the difference between good and great players though.

Yeah this is ultimately the real test of depth.

I don't see the hypnotism being so good, since it require two rolls and it doesn't take away the monsters actual action. About all I really can see is having a PC with a deliberately abysmal will defense to take advantage of it. Can you voluntarily fail a Will Defense? I don't even know. I don't thi...

Wow.... the Mage is just a totally crippled version of the wizard. Seriously, beguiling strands? Do like 5 damage to someone and push them 3 squares? What the fuck... don't they realize yet that the minor battlefield shifts are totally useless since your enemy just uses a move action and is back in ...

The reason why fantasy worlds are so small is because, well, it's fucking based off of the realities of 'real world', pre-Industrial Revolution. Travel is difficult, long, and dangerous. Unless you have the gods giving you really detailed maps most of the world outside your bubble is completely for...

Fate does something admirable, which is to give a demonstrable and fluid reward system for players being engaged with the game. However it does not do what the designers apparently want it to do, which is to keep one player from hogging the spotlight. You can essentially buy screen time with fate p...

Aspects also allow for a fast, elegant game that does not require long enormous enumerations of conditions and penalties. Scenes can have Aspects like Dark , or On Fire , goons may be Over-confident , or Fed Up With The Boss , and the exact game mechanical consequence is defined collaboratively, in...

I fail to see how it is practical to list every possible exception, including such accidents as "My little sister got behind the wheel and smashed the car into a tree", or "A tyhoon swept my car away". How is it not practical to know what your policies don't work against? Being ...

But that doesn't rationalize why crazy people get divine power. Silver Flame-ites don't believe that there's no god but the Flame; they believe in converting everyone who isn't evil to worship of the Silver Flame (and setting evil people on fire), so that the other gods cease to be and the world is...

You cannot prove intent. You're right, but you can simply issue them a warning to clarify things, and fine them if they don't. You can reduce obfuscation with some basic rules. Like a vehicle warranty has to be written such that it says what it doesn't include as opposed to what it does. This makes...

Aside from the "D&D has always had 6 stats" argument, I honestly I can't see a good reason for keeping it.

So no, asking the goverment to cover up for these irresponsible idiots isn't their job. It's a personal responsibility. Nobody is asking the government to do that. If one guy is just an idiot and gets confused, that's one thing. But it's another if a lot of people are getting confused because the b...

Actually, that's precisely the reason why I despise Charisma as a stat in D&D. Charisma is your 'seduce your preferred sex and become a well-loved hero' stat. Which means that if you're a fucking fighter or a rogue you need to make the choice between being effective and getting in-universe atte...

The new magic missile is pretty awful. Basically you cast it and the wizard doesn't touch the dice the whole time. The spell autohits and the damage is static. It's the perfect spell to spam if you just want to play video games the entire session and let someone else run your character for you. It's...

So unless your bonus typing is so aggressive that there is in fact only one bonus type (type named "bonus" I guess), the bonus typing paradigm is not the best manner to reign in RNG shattering bonus accumulation. Hell, it's not even a method to reign that in, because bonus typing does not...

Granularity for me has always meant how many subsystems you have for things and how complex those systems are. So 2e Shadowrun's unarmed combat has small amounts of granularity because it's a contested roll and someone wins. There are no maneuvers or combat abilities or weird things happening. It's...

The best idea for that is just to combine charisma and wisdom into one stat.

It's also generally advised you combine strength/con as well.

If the bonuses to diplomacy were more tightly controlled you would instantly solve the diplomancer problem right away. Blaming diplomacy problems on the skill itself is getting the cart before the horse. Well no, diplomacy just sucks ass as it's written. Mainly because the DCs are static and don't ...

Controlling straight bonus accumulation is best done with aggressive bonus typing.

Right, I'm linking granularity to balance because with more subsystems comes more potential for unexpected abuses. I mean, it becomes harder to abuse the way that subsystems interact with each other if you have fewer subsystems and are writing fewer abilities for those subsystems. Is that such a fo...

I personally hate puzzle monsters. At best, you get an auto-lose monster. At worse, you punish and maybe TPK the party because they didn't read the MM as well are you and/or failed a Knowledge check. Puzzle monsters shouldn't exist in the base MM. At all. They should always be unique monsters to a ...