The Gaming Den

The nice thing about designing a setting and not just a single campaign is that the first and last option there are fully compatible.

What makes Ronan more powerful than, say, Tony Stark? Isn't he just a normal mortal that wanders the universe blowing up what he perceives as enemies of the Kree? Good question. In the comics (and since we have no information either way from the movies, we might as well assume the same goes for the...

I converted the module to 3.5 and ran it for a group I GMed way back in college. But in the process of adapting it to the modern rules paradigm I made it rather less arbitrary and deadly. Which was for the best since not only did I insert it into an ongoing campaign, but (in order for this sort of &...

Thank you all. (Yes, even Grek.)

I regret everything. Now I've derailed the discussion of my own question.

(The original hypothetical case can't have been conspiracy because the third party didn't know about the crime at all until after it had been committed.)

Yes, but on what charges?

Not a game question per se but it's for a game and it's pretty fantastical, so this seemed more appropriate than the MPSIMS thread... If someone were to steal, say, an in-development weapon prototype (from the US government) and then gave it to a third party, but the third party was not involved in ...

Well, those questions need to be a bit more spesific to be answerable because the differences between resource management mechanics are rarely, if ever as simple as "good" vs. "bad". Magic points could be best, spell slots could be, or some third system could be better than eithe...

It doesn't particularly matter whether any particular output is "too powerful" or not when the criticism is that the system makes no sense and the outputs are one step removed from completely arbitrary.

But those rules are patent nonsense.

Using them, it costs less to make an infinite healing engine than to build a covered pit.

Anyone designing in good faith should just quietly pretend those rules don't exist, until someone writes a better trapmaking system.

But DDM, that was already addressed. If you live in Grand Forks and you want to have a 30-member vampire LARP, then you take advantage of the fact that the exact distribution of the 30k isn't defined anywhere. There's more than enough space in the US to absorb whatever demographic oddities you creat...

So if I'm reading you right you're saying that yes, as fun as they are to read, all those pages spent on Gun and Fu schticks are in fact a waste of space from the perspective of actually playing the game, and if you wanted to write an edition of Feng Shui that aspired to being good, you'd cut them d...

Feng Shui 1e was, for its time, a great game. Feng Shui 2, 20 years later, was mostly a great disappointment, with rule changes and schtick writeups that, notwithstanding a few genuine improvements, bore every sign of having been ad-libbed by a roomful of Jammers with typewriters. But as I try to dr...

As long as he has it within his range to be a little less... jolly than his usual ouvre, I think this sounds like brilliant casting. Is Gotrek really all that different from Prince Vultan in a fatalistic mood?

Overall, I've seen worse surveys, but some of these questions are just spectacularly unhelpfully framed - it's not at all clear what "very important" means, and for some questions that actually makes it impossible to give a useful answer. #43 is a great example, that I ultimately just had ...

This is relevant to my interests.

But how do you determine monster HD type? You're using everything from d4 to d12, and it doesn't seem to be based on size, type, tier or encounter design role?

Can you give an example of a damage system that has Illusion damage? (And where damage isn't so completely abstract that it has just as much support for "being forced to herd ducks"-damage, like Nobilis or something?)

Well, it's a little more of an issue than that because it's not the Paladin themselves who decides what justifications will fly, but the Big Guy in the Sky. But basically, what Frank said is correct. Plenty of leeway for a Paladin to kill people as long as it's the right people for the right reasons...

This is the opposite of true. If the basic unit of encounter is one level appropriate Brute, then you can't have regular encounters with boss monsters at all. If you are already intending to have 4 Hill Giants appear at level 6, then you can make a regular encounter that has 2 Hill Giants and a Fro...

This is dumb and also fails to understand the core principle of tiering in the first place. The Wraith is a level 4 enemy because you have the tools to fight it at 4th level. It's not a tossup at 1st level, it will fucking wreck you. It's true, that was a dumb suggestion. It was intended to illustr...

3e already solved the CR versus Level issue by having separate concepts of CR and EL, which appear to be getting conflated here. Your lone CR 5 Medusa is an EL 5, which is a "Very Difficult" (aka fatality coinflip) challenge for your lone Level 5 Rogue. This EL 5 encounter is an Easy chal...

You could just advise DMs to use lower CR/level encounters instead of course but why do that when you can just make the CR (and the challenges themselves) fit what people should actually be using in the first place? Mostly because, if CR =/= level, it means "level" no longer has a consist...

You're looking at this from the wrong angle. The question isn't "What can an Elf Rogue do to be as good as a Medusa?" it's "What can a Medusa do to be as good as an Elf Rogue?" The Elf Rogue is a Player Character with levels in a Player Character Class. That means that the Medus...

What about "I can't believe it's not an Evocation", Incendiary Cloud?

If you're using Frank's suggested lower levels for arcane Evocations (these) , what levels should you assign to divine Evocations like Flame Strike and Fire Storm? Flame Strike is basically the cleric's Fireball and has previously been higher level to be worse... but does it need to be 2nd level whe...