The Gaming Den

Yeah, that really really sucks. How're you supposed to kidnap the bad guy and terrify the information out of him when? Oh, I forgot, you're not. Even if you somehow manage to flange getting one of the mind-flayer's Ogre minions tied up so you can learn the layout of the underground lair, he'll die f...

but it's hard when you realise that in a few levels' time the damage the melee types are dishing out will hardly matter and the most effective tactic will be getting them to stand in front of me and soak up pain while I kill everyone with my mind. The damage will still matter, it just gets harder a...

I admit, I'm sort of enjoying watching the martial characters strut their stuff. The Shifter Barbarian doing her thing is a sight to behold with me dropping an Enlarge Person on her in the first round and putting the bad guys on their arses with a Sculpted Grease in the second round so she can get s...

I love 1st and 2nd level play. Everyone can pull off all the bullshit combat maneuvers and really think outside the box because the numbers haven't had time to diverge enough to push you off the RNG. Wizards run around with small numbers of mass death spells, and a Fighter can move and swing his gl...

Yeah, seconded. I can understand the desire to house-rule Wish out of play and keep it a plot-only device. It's the lazy way of dealing with the spell, but certainly faster than a comprehensive list of what it can and can't do... But critical fumbles on a 1? Every time? Asshole. Get yourself some of...

I kind of like the idea of giving characters the ability to announce their minor abilities by using them . That is, during an adventure you get to pick a minor ability - but you actually pick it during the adventure when it would be useful. Like any other retroactive training sequence from any adve...

...because doing dangerous shit for no particular prospect of reward is pretty much the defining characteristic of a hero. Groundless risk = suicidal, because you're risking your life for no fucking reason. No, making your fictional character seem to be a 'hero' is not a reason. This is both atypic...

Wow, this has got weird. If you're playing the kind of game where the good guys wouldn't do good things if they didn't know they were getting paid, then the good guys are not good guys. If they just won't do good *dangerous* things without getting paid, then they may still be goodish guys but they'r...

Uh-huh - and that's what you get when the *other* type of player is at the table, but if I've chosen to play D&D rather than a more angsty game, I'd prefer the "don't think about it, just kill them" approach because that's entirely what the game is set up to do. Naturally, the converse...

All true. It's actually pretty difficult for D&D *not* to turn into a horror game when you've got a certain type of person at the gaming table. You know the ones; they've chosen character concepts that are deeply concerned about the morality of killing things just because they're scaly, insist o...

Gods don't exist in the "real world", and yet we have religion. Religion is ultimately born from a confluence of wishful thinking, an ignorance of how the natural world works, and our tendency as a species to organize ourselves in a hierarchical fashion. Forget D&D - religion is the o...

I thought they pretty much had!

I suspect that someone, at some point, said during a design meeting; "Hang on, characters with horses can go faster than some level-appropriate monsters and would therefore be less likely to die senselessly! For the love of christ, nerf the horses, quick!".

Or something.

In the unlikely event that anyone cares, I have had some thoughts on this very topic. The below is an e-mail I sent to some friends over a year ago. I haven't done any significant editing so bits of it might seem irrelevant or just plain odd, but the overall gist was highly pertinent. Oh yeah, and I...

Yes. 6d6-keep-best-three is more likely to turn up a top-of-the-bell-curve result than 6d10-keep-best-three.

I came into the hobby too late to catch anything more than the tail-end of 1st Edition. By the time I arrived on the scene, all the people I was playing with - who were a few years older than me - were basically using a massive set of their own house rules to make some sense of the massive set of ho...

You're right, the Tomes are a huge set of house rules for D&D, but they were established with the avowed intention of doing a rewrite; not because 3.5 was unplayable, but because it could have been done better, and because the classes were vastly imbalanced. The fact that warriors suck relative ...

There's "house rules" and there's "rewriting large sections of the system from scratch". House-ruling D&D 3.5 mostly just needs brick walls built in front of obvious abuses and some common sense applied when absurdities crop up. Iron Heroes takes it to a whole new level of fa...

The gods can give you an order, the powerful characters can push weaker people around and so on down the scale. "It is the way of the world Baldrick: the abused always kick downwards. I am annoyed and so I kick the cat," [miaow] "the cat" [squeak] "pounces on the mouse, and...

Nice post Lago; I'm in full agreement - particularly with respect to the massive pile of fail that is the attempt to create in-party balance. I'd comment further but I think you've probably said everything I might have, but better!

A "yes" from me here, with caveats. I'm all for the Greek pantheon style deities; basically whimsical superpowered beings who like to dick around with the mortal realms for shits and giggles, and who could and at the same time couldn't be killed, hampered by a load of restrictions negotiat...

Rules, in general, stretch disbelief. A 3e fighter can jump off a 100 foot cliff, take a handful of d6's in damage, stand up, go on a four hour hike, then hack apart goblins for a while. 4e has its own brand of silliness in several areas. Oh yes, yes it does, and whilst I'm aware I'm now jumping in...

I didn't think there was much wrong with the 3.5 skill system at heart, and Aid Another was far from a stupid thing to do at low levels for exactly the reasons already described. Where it fell down was in the descriptions of what some of the specific skills could do, and in providing so many differe...

With nonlethal damage, however, it's viable to have it make sense. No, you can't charm someone to death. You can wear down their mind. Beating someone wears down their body, why shouldn't performing acts that basically amount to holding someone in a mental chokehold wear down down their mind? Might...

When are we going to have some arguments in favour of 4th Edition in the "Arguments in favor of 4th Edition" thread, I wonder? Thus far there have been "Arguments as to why 4th Edition mostly doesn't suck any worse than 3.x Edition except for when it does," but nothing substantiv...