The Gaming Den

I'm cautiously optimistic. I didn't have too much trouble with the rules, because the GM was good at patching over the parts that didn't work, and because I was hype enough about the setting to put up with the fiddliness. However, several people in the group really didn't grok the system, and that's...

It's pretty badly written also: Spells that deal damage have normal effects unless an affected creature succeeds on a Will save. Each disbelieving creature takes only one-fifth damage from the attack. If the disbelieved attack has a special effect other than damage, that effect is one-fifth as stron...

Two Nests and one Blowfly Infestation, then just keep targeting the scarab tokens until you have as many as desired. You will need a Toughness 2+ creature to end the loop though, Infestation isn't optional.

When you extend your shitty logic to the rest of the game, you have to throw out the entire concept of "level-appropriate challenge" and "progression" as being "descriptions on the slot machine." Fighting increasingly tough monsters as you increase in levels, primarily...

From what you've described for why people do play Mage, sounds like it's people who took the exact wrong message after reading V for Vendetta. Eh, we just played it as "urban fantasy, secret organizations, wizard politics, doing cool shit with magic, sometimes monsters show up". There's a...

My experience with Spirit is that it goes almost straight from sucking to "do all the things" when it hits a tipping point. At the start, you can talk to spirits, and they're mostly not too helpful. By doing a lot of favors for them, they might assist you with some stuff, maybe. Oh, and yo...

The kingdom rules changed slightly between the Kingmaker AP and when they appeared in Ultimate Campaign (which is what the version in the SRD is). Notably: * Brothel renamed to Dance Hall * You can no longer order shops to sell things for extra BP. This used to be the major source of income for the ...

Ah, the Intellect Devourer - the point where it became clear the the 5E authors didn't know or didn't care what CR was for. A monster with nasty SoDs that buff it hugely if they work and good stealth skills, and an ambush ability that can only be foiled by acting like paranoia murderhobos, and it's ...

Adding extra enemies is easy, but depending on in what way the PCs are off the power curve, it might not help. If the problem is that their defense is at untouchable levels, then additional goblins (or whatever) aren't going to accomplish jack shit. If they have area attacks that kill everything, th...

If this is for a new campaign, just have that be part of the premise - you start out as conscripted gladiators. Simple, and avoids players being pissed off about railroading and/or avoiding the conscription somehow and skipping the whole thing. Also you don't have to worry about someone's character ...

I don't have a problem with secret rolls for some things (spotting an invisible foe, Will save against scrying, other stuff like that). In fact, I often don't want to know info that my character doesn't, because by being told I lose the chance to try and deduce it. For example, if there are a bunch ...

The PF Devs seem to really hate it when anybody comes up with a combo that they didn't explicitly intend to be there. This spell shatters balance into a million pieces? Oh, well, the GM can fix it. Or I guess we may get around to errata someday. These three feats let you take an extra 5' step, and t...

I like that idea - a diviner is about the perfect flavor to go with WoF. For the Jedi look IDK if verbal components would fit though, maybe just somatic ones + ASF. "Stealthy diviner" seems like a natural combination. I would still go with the utility/strategic divinations though; I see no...

No monetary cost, and nobody cares about that anyway when infinite gold is on the table. At least in theory, infinite gold is on the table. For that matter, a first-level Dragonfire Adept can have Identify (no material components) at will and nobody ever plays them . Meanwhile, here is the actual c...

Ignoring the low level stuff, which I agree is not very impressive (except Detect Thoughts), several of these are pretty damn useful. Also there are more useful ones outside of the PHB, but leaving that aside for now: Detect Thoughts - Allows you to telepathically listen in on someone within 60 feet...

As previously mentioned, most DnD divination is pretty underwhelming. Low-level stuff, maybe. High level jumps straight into "have specific counter-measures or you lose" territory, able to find out exactly who your enemies are, what they're doing, and how to stop them, for example. Or bui...

Ah...memories of playing with the Gnomes of Zurich from the original Illuminati. Just wait until you have enough money and then declare victory! I found that after a few games everybody would just fuck with the Gnome (and often UFO) player always , whether or not they appeared to be doing well. Whi...

Now, people do clutch their pearls over this notion, that a core monk can use a gauntlet. This is largely because they are stupid fuckers, and also because other stupid fuckers wrote rules for shitty amulets dedicated to putting plusses on your unarmed strikes in a wildly cost-inefficient fashion. ...

Also that they nerf stuff that was fine in home games for the sake of PFS. I could not give less of a shit about organized play, so it's particularly annoying to me. Even for people who do, PFS already has a ban list; they could have just added it to that.

A number of 5E fans consider it a "feature". Like, apparently having rules for being on fire sucked, because it was so slow to look them up, and it got in the way of DM dick waving intelligent DM adjudication. So the new situation where the DM is just supposed to ass-pull something is a bi...

Since warriors are underpowered, all nerfs to them are bad no matter how flavorful they happen to be. Again, because fucking obviously. If we're just judging by how good the Fighter has it, I guess 4E is the best edition? :uptosomething: Whether the warrior-type has it better in 3.0 or 3.5 depends ...

So the 3.0 DR is better because it barely ever matters? That's dumb, better to just not have DR than "You must be this tall to ride DR" which can screw over warriors in several ways and is completely irrelevant when it doesn't do that. Problems with it: 1) Amplifies the dependence on speci...

So IIRC, in the original AW, each move had its own things that happened on a fail, rather than the ubiquitous "GM makes a hard move" result that's been used since then. And the failure result for "Read a Situation" was just that you didn't notice anything. Personally, I liked tha...

As I understand the rules, at the moment the MC gives an answer, it becomes the truth. At the moment the MC answers "the best way of escaping is taking an hostage", it becomes the best way of escaping. Any idea the PCs may have is automatically worse, because the rules say so. At that poi...

Was "Simulacra everywhere" mentioned? I don't have a name, maybe call it the King/Queen of Infinite Fakes. It could be considered an affiliate of the Wish, because it's a thought experiment to demonstrate why no-cost Wishes* always bring things into TO territory. 1) Get a shitload of Wishe...