The Gaming Den

I think Hernan Cortez maps pretty well to a D&D character's exploits. He crushes Classical societies, he knocks over their temples of doom, he wins fights against enormous throngs of competent hostiles by being an unscrupulous little fuckhead. Does everything you need in a D&D hero. We've go...

The dragon has -12000 rep with the Village of Crappington so killing him is worth abs(-12000) / 2 = 6000 rep. Something like that. Oh boy, no. That's a "Let's give the dragon an extra week to trash the country side, maybe even see if it wanders over and racks up some points against the elf kin...

But I'm still not sure why you need slots . It seems like you'd get the same effect by just sufficiently limiting the mana available, particularly since you're only spending one mana per slot. So having 2 red mana and 3 blue mana is equivalent to having 5 slots. It's not identical, of course; you g...

On another read, I guess what I should promote isn't that carrying the sword counts as slot occupation, it's that empty-handed techniques can and should exist so that the sword has a valid player ability that it's displacing. But the first thing I thought of was that there doesn't have to be bother ...

Carrying a sword is having it assigned to a slot, unless you think having a sword in your hand shouldn't preclude having another sword in that same hand at that same moment. Whether you need the tiered system where you can preform chakra binds and then be wearing your vest or holding your sword supe...

So you think people will play tapeworms and sea anemones, bearing in mind that the habits and biology of both of these things are extremely well understood, as compared to, say, the society of millennium-old humans with pointy ears?

Well I think the tool manipulation is the biggest sticking point unless you just assume everyone playing the thing you're making is just going to be a Beholder reskin with arbitrary telepathy and a suite of fighting spells to make you not care. So you could have an underwater adventure where some ch...

No, no, you've got it all wrong. Detect Magic is pointless if you've got a Psion with Detect Psionics. There's not an actual spell somewhere called Detect Psionics, is there? I just looked in the SRD and, while there are indeed a handfull of actual spells that were authored and printed with the Psio...

double post

Famous Morality: The Virtue of Glory The idea is that Good is about people knowing and approving of your actions. The more people who want to act like you do, the more good you are. Doing things that make people happy is good because they will remember you for it. You fight Balors and Dragons becau...

Well, it seems like he put his slider right where he wanted it, so that much consideration, at least, is already over. A cliche party would be the usual fighter, mage, thief, cleric. How would one design a mirror opposite party, class wise, ignoring the goatee application? I find the mirror opposite...

A marvelous idea.

A Pain Maiden of Loviatar comes equipped with the special ability to use a whip in a very painful but ultimately benign fashion. By attacking her companions she can push the duration of any encounter into hours. Oh yeah baby. Pick that lock, you little whore.

How exquisite.

Encounter was a thing they came up with when they realized people were just using that as a heuristic device to measure the short term instead of taking pains to parse five-minute intervals. That's not a practice that should end but it is one that they should just tell you in a sidebar somewhere, an...

Adventure hook: When humans first made landings on the black coast, Queens Falls was host to a family of boatswains and guides who navigated with such skill that their routes carried travelers not only to the Falls' constituent rivers, but seemingly unconnected waterways further inland. The family n...

You should do something cute with cone snails. Their shells can be used to make a spiral ndoro talisman which were/are attested to have some manner of spiritual power, which says to me that there's an opportunity to have a creature with some overtly magical mechanics that you like but couldn't other...

Lokathor wrote:

Eikre wrote:

...I don't understand this.

Well most people don't, it's sort of hard to follow, especially that first chapter. Just try and get your Read/Write bonus up a few plusses and try it again.

Clearly Szass Tam doesn't exist when you're doing it this way. Or if he exists then he's less god-king and more Harrison Ford from Airforce One , presumably competent but probably not prudent unless he keeps plenty of Skeletal Service guys around. The characters will not look pathetic and stupid unl...

The way I see it, in 4E you're the same dude from the moment you buy a griffin until whenever the end of the campaign is. No use in pretending you're moving through different "tiers." So. Characters never get their 1/2 charlevel bonus ever again. Monsters will have 1/2 their encounter leve...

the 2nd edition system where they tried to get you to accept a Fighter 3 / Thief 3 as a 4th level character is bullshit . Do you take offense to this because of procedural problems with using the system itself, or because you have a problem with characters whose schticks are getting level-appropria...

The benefit of having distant gods is that most people are already pretty used to living in a world (which is to say, this one) where gods seem to do fuck all. It achieves two things from a story perspective: First, it firmly puts aside the notion that the 18th level cleric you're playing is just a ...

No. It's not. While a sapient species would probably dress it up that way and thus it would look to outsiders like some expensive but ultimately unexceptional mating customs , it's really not. The Lek is a mandatory thing. If there are small numbers of you in the distant South in Frostling territor...

Well that's the whole thing about "rationality". I mean I know we do this anthrocentrisim thing to make it more morally palatable to deal with eating cows and not holding cops who shoot dogs culpable for killing a member of some dude's family, but really, intelligence is a continuum... Sor...