The Gaming Den

Heh - that's funny; I had a very similar thought from the opposite direction! I practised [ju-jitsu] (insert favoured spelling here), where you could never use *any* move to its fullest potential because the stated aim of pretty much everything you did was to main your opponent horribly. Competitive...

RC, it's not FUN to have someone heal you and leave you unconscious. OTOH if you are going to have people jumping up in a fight they need to have HP. If you're an active threat with only 1hp you're far more likely to be dead dead after the next enemy attack. So it makes sense to do it that way if f...

It's not even the getting up for no reason which is something that you've got to worry about. That only happens on natural 20. Yeah, I know, I was aiming for comedic hyperbole alluding to the fact that someone's very likely to activate a power that triggers a healing surge in the downed PC: hence n...

Well of course it isn't wrong, it just reads as though that's not the way it's intended to work. It just seems to be one area where mileages vary more than most: how much the DM is supposed to "interpret" the creatures and think about the best way for them to use their abilities. Personall...

Firstly, SunTzu is right and the slam attack is overriden; you don't get it in addition to the "claw" natural weapon attacks (which are modified to being slam attacks by Fist of the Ghoul but still don't stack). Seoncdly, SunTzu is right again and you've got to have 6 levels for each itera...

I thought the whole point of 4E was that the DM actually IS just a script-running engine? You get the tactics you're supposed to use handed on a plate: A mummy lord uses plague of doom against a foe before entering melee combat. It stays close to an ally while making shielding mace attacks, focusing...

I've got it. Likewise, I thought the Soul Magic spells were useful... to the extent where I'm using a modified version of the Imperative Soul Magic as a campaign hook at the moment. Magic users are disappearing from the city because a powerful entity has created a self-replicating Soul Magic spell t...

Another thought, sort of a corollary to the first. At the moment, the people in the D&D game who have access to magic are the elite. Your village yeoman guard won't have anyone who can cast Zone of Truth to interrogate prisoners with. In this scenario, it's turned around. When the spell is merel...

I think a related way of introducing some of those spells back into the game is by introducing *degrees* of failure. At the moment, if you're hit by a spell that basically kills you by making you unable to act for a round per level, it's all or nothing. If your degree of opposition to the magic can ...

Hmmm... instead of excluding the likes of Zone of Truth, why not go to opposed attack/defenses? You want Charisma (or "personality" or whatever) to remain important, don't you? Then maybe Silk or the Grey Mouser could "parry" such a spell because they're just so damn good at lyin...

I see what Mr_Bane means... there's no compelling reason to take a Bard unless you're in a big group where all the main niches have been filled and you want a generalist who can be *almost* as good as the others in several areas. The plus point of a Bard is that you can nearly always find something ...

Going back to making someone's combat prowess really matter to the point where they can take on level-appropriate opponents with their big swords and have a chance of winning, I believe there is a simple solution in the form of parrying. We've got a straightforward mechanic in the system - BAB - tha...

An evil character in a group can work well - and this is borne out by other anecdotes on the thread - when the story is allowed to become *about* the player characters, not just *starring* the player characters. This tends to happen anyway at high levels, but there's no reason why a campaign at any ...

Then what about the second scenario I outlined, where the bottom end is increased - you could do it *without* skill ranks just by changing the die range - and the highest result you can roll increases too?

PR... where does that second quote in your sig come from? That's some quality fever-pitch ranting, right there!

There must be a chance of failure, the dice must be allowed to have their say, but failure should only be possible at critical junctures. If a PC who is *good* at making rousing speeches makes a rousing speech, the worst that should be allowed to happen from a throw of the dice is that they don't ge...

But... aren't we talking about the way skills currently work but with more degrees? You can't get better than 10 untrained no matter what you roll, and your skill ranks add to the result. If you're "locking" the d20 to a range of 10, you're just using a special d10 with a 55% chance of rol...

Well yes, but 3E high levels fundamentally didn't make any reference to the RNG most of the time. Epic levels in particular could have more-or-less dispensed with the d20 rolls. Once you've got base numbers that are orders of magnitude greater than the RNG can supply, it's more than faintly ridiculo...

And that's the kind of thing that made Gygax notoriously bad. A lot of the shit you couldn't see coming and it would kill you. And the only way to avoid it was to read the DM's mind, because often, there just weren't any clues in the actual dungeon. This shouldn't even be called Gygaxian bullshit, ...

I think items that scale on character power and that potentially even work differently based on what abilities the *character* has are A Good Thing: http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=90966&highlight=#90966 Take the money elements more-or-less out of it, apart from basic little piddly-shit items l...

I'm not sure that we're necessarily making valid comparisons here. You *don't* expect a Level 10 warrior to beat a CR10 creature 50% of the time, because CR "shows the average level of a party of adventurers for which one creature would make an encounter of moderate difficulty". Yes, yes ...

And of course, several of the proposed approaches to Goodness are going to put people who think of themselves as on Team Good in much greater consonance with people on Team Evil than many of those on Team Other Good. Which is both cool and difficult, in a world where objective Good and Evil exist, a...

Nice reference SunTzu: thanks for that!

Fair enough, that's a reasonable response. There are such powers in the game and they probably all want re-writing. I for one am perfectly happy with the idea that enemies and allies can be abandoned as mechnical concepts, if we're saying that we throw out or fix all the powers that rely on them for...

I'm not sure that we're necessarily making valid comparisons here. You *don't* expect a Level 10 warrior to beat a CR10 creature 50% of the time, because CR "shows the average level of a party of adventurers for which one creature would make an encounter of moderate difficulty". That's a p...