The Gaming Den

Why is this even a big deal? From the way I read the RAW, hardness applies even to acid and sonic attacks. But if you think that's dumb, houserule it so it doesn't. It doesn't matter which way you want it, as long as you're clear and consistent about it.

It's been said before that it's best to describe campaigns rather than settings as either PoD or PoL. Hell, it can even switch between one or the other mid-campaign. Say your campaign starts in a city with the PCs as new recruits in the city guard. There's a criminal element to the city, but not a m...

So guys, we still feeding the troll in here?

I guess so. Have fun with that.

Psychic Robot wrote:You, sir, are and idiot.

This sentence made me giggle.

Just thought I'd share.

Well, sure, a certain amount of it is inevitable, but I don't think we want to encourage it, which is what K seems to be suggesting.

If one guy wants to stop the enemy army on Front A by diplomancing the commander and another player wants to stop the army on Front B by raising an army of the dead, then that's cool because both armies get defeated for the purposes of the adventure and the players got to do it their way. The probl...

The tier system only works if you're dealing with character power, which in a D&D style RPG means "ability to fight people", since no one wants to play the diplomat who has intriguing conversations with the king's treasurer but has to hide every time swords come out because he hits lik...

Honestly, forget about making NPCs real wizards, we want to make them close to what a wizard does, so they feel wizardly, but we don't want to actually ever use the wizard class. That's just a big massive can of worms which we should avoid at all costs. That seems like a bad idea to me. If your par...

If you tie Caster level to HD then the one level of wizard might indeed prove useful (this is an idea out of Trailblazer). I thought about that, but then it gets ugly where you can do things like take 19 levels of fighter (or play as a level 19 monster) and then take 1 level of wizard and get all t...

I was thinking about this, and it seems to me that instead of balancing monsters by the sort of party that could take them down, wouldn't it make more sense to balance them in comparison to an individual character ? Balancing by party is difficult/impossible because you have to make assumptions abou...

No, I'm complaining because it is Chrono Trigger 2 but they also took a shit on it. Let me try rephrasing this. You don't like Chrono Cross because of its relationship to Chrono Trigger. If it weren't for the way it was connected to Chrono Trigger, you wouldn't have a problem with it. (Or at least,...

Sure, I already said I can understand why you'd be disappointed that it wasn't Chrono Trigger 2. But the fact that it wasn't doesn't make it bad. Chocolate cake is not bad just because that's not what you were expecting. Chocolate cake can still be pretty tasty if you're not so focused on the fact t...

But that's exactly how NPCs are supposed to work in campaign books. That's why they are statted out ahead of time. Sure -- if you have an NPC, then he belongs in the world, and you can encounter him in that world. But the point I'm trying to make is that if you have a specific NPC that you know you...

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Chrono Cross only interacts with the old game to give the finger to old plot elements (HURR HURR LUCCA DIED IN AN ORPHANAGE FIRE) and to whinge upon ridiculous plot tumors no one gave a fuck about. Dinotopia? Seriously?

Hey, guess what. You're still complaining because it's not Chrono Trigger 2.

But you're talking about famous public domain characters like Dracula and Robin Hood -- character archetypes who should really be main characters, if not the focus of the whole campaign. and they're not likely to stumble across the PCs by accident so you should have plenty of time to stat them out ...

Chrono Cross lost me the very moment they threw down the revelation that they were not in fact going to travel through time or interact with the original Chrono Trigger plotline at all. The fact that they subsequently killed all the characters from the first game and then wrote them out of history ...

This NPC book would ideally have ways for you to tweak said guard with minimal effort so that while they are still recognizable L3 Human Guards they are still noticably different from each other. Er, do you really need a whole book for that? You can just DO that. Say "this one has a polearm an...

It sounds like what you want is the Monster Manual, only mostly humanoids instead of, y'know, monsters. Stuff that's statted out for you already so you can drop it wholesale into your campaign. Something with entries like "mid level general arcane caster" and "high level heavy melee s...

Lago PARANOIA wrote: because Chrono Cross sucks monkey fuck

I'm sensing some bitterness here.

Then wear some damn half-plate. Hooray for exception-based design! Wouldn't work. It applies to all heavy armor; the full plate thing was just an example. The point is that you have to be proficient in the armor you're wearing, made of mithral or no -- making it out of mithral just keeps from blowi...

So yeah, it's totally possible, even desirable for individual characters to exist simultaneously in multiple tiers and to use their abilities from the tier that is being interacted with at any given moment. Wait, what? I thought the whole point of the tier system was to match everyone's power level...

While all of that is true, it doesn't really have anything to do with the tier system. What you're talking about is effectively turning it from a tactical game ("if I move five feet to the left, I can cast a fireball at the bugbear without getting stabbed by the orc") to a strategic game (...

I don't think some of these problems are solvable. The encounter difficulty balancing, in particular, strikes me as impossible to ever really "fix". You can do better than 3E does, certainly, but in the end it's always going to come down to the fact that your party is different than everyo...

Does "can farm harder than six normal men" even need to be made explicit in the mechanics? If the whole point of tiers is to organize combat power (so you don't have a level 20 commoner who can forge seventeen masterwork longswords per day but can get his ass kicked by a level 5 fighter), ...

Regardless of whether or not it's crap (which is arguable, but not what's under discussion here), the point was that he didn't change anything except the names. He's trying to separate intentions from consequences, where light is "good intentions" and dark is "evil intentions" wi...