The Gaming Den

Murtak, official pre-made dungeons are total bullshit, where traps placed at random and all monsters are very tolerant so they agree to live near zombies, oozes and other stuff from MM placed just to make encounters different from one another. Generally speaking, DnD game designers think "they...

Lunars were never intended to be a protagonist faction. In the initial books it was assumed that the Lunars had fallen from favor and were largely insane due to their exposure to the Wyld. Later books wanted more heroic companions to the Solar Exalted, and, well, furries, and thus the possibility of...

Mostly, I think it's avoided because everyone DOES do it... in their home campaign. So it's kind of unnecessary to write it up. But yeah, a church with actual paladins is kind of hard to work as "secretly evil, visibly good." Paladins will notice their loss of abilities for constantly sup...

While Frank's comment makes sense, I would write up what most of the prestige classes you have in mind are with a 1-2 sentence description so that when someone wants to take one they could have a starting point to ask around, while still not locking yourself down enough, so that if you want you can ...

The persistent image spell does not say it can convince anyone of informed abilities, it only gives you the ability to describe it, and it is up to them to convince themselves of any of the following beliefs (most people will rapidly convince themselves that a flaming sword will burn them)... So I w...

Too much influence by staff who believe in the Sky Fairy and refuse to draw any parallels. I don't believe this is true. Look, Sky Wizard's Guilds have intense rivalries with each other. Thus, any chance to pin the blame on someone else's guild or Sky Wizard or whatever is just oozing with possibil...

Racial mishmash? Do you mean, Japanese and non-Japanese, or human and non-human? if you mean human and non-human, OK, you're getting something a bit Journey to the West style. In fact, honestly, I would suggest not drawing on solely Japanese myths, with your setup here, and instead drawing on Chines...

All of those were techniques that they had already repeated time and time again, merely recombined in a different way. They weren't a radical reformulation of the ability entirely. Katara had already, if I recall correctly, done water, water to ice, and fiddling with ice. That she synthesized new pa...

They are kung fu techniques, not random wizard powers. You have to keep in mind that Katara had to be taught special techniques just to be able to remove the water from grass.

Have the environment and circumstances of battle have its own cards that you can interact with, like TORG. Any cards that it has decked would be introduced in a fairly predictable manner unless someone did something special, and the cards may or may not do anything, but it would help give a sense of...

Frank, with your deck mechanic how many cards do you think should be in a deck? Would you allow duplicates in the deck as well? Depends on the prevalence of card drawing effects and the intended frequency of wrap-arounds. How often do people repeat maneuvers? Probably requires at least five times h...

Bending is definitely an innate thing. There are people who simply have no bending and will never get bending. Katara can learn new uses of Water Bending, but she can't learn Earth Bending from Toph, because she has no Earth Bending. Mai and Ty Lee have no bending, despite being very accomplished a...

Stahlseele wrote:If having fun means behaving as if i were back in school, something is wrong. Period.

If having fun means behaving like a twit, something is wrong. Period.

You know, along these lines, I've always wondered why bonuses are largely accumulative? Why doesn't the game instead provide more large bonuses that simply override all smaller bonuses to [thing] or [action]? ... This way, characters might not have to worry about hunting down every +1 bonus they ca...

I think PhoneLobster has simply discovered a common Internet Debating tactic, one that passes on forums and Congress all the time but doesn't clear the rules of even high school debate teams. Simply, if you stay on top of the argument (top as in control, as in demanding people cater to you instead o...

Then Wan Shit Fong is setting an impossible standard for knowledge, considering how they weren't researching weapons or anything but determining when a fucking eclipse was happening. You may as well hoard your knowledge about vulcanizing rubber (otherwise you couldn't have anything but treads), gea...

I'll keep poking around. Several pieces seem like real innovations like "Instincts," which are just pre-actions you write on your character sheet. You could seriously save time during a session if you just say "I check for trap on doors and chests before I open them." Beliefs an...

Kaelik, the only one trolling here is you, but that shouldn't surprise anyone, given that you're a useless cockbag. Please redirect your ejaculate back into your own mouth and swallow so other people don't have to deal with it rather than spraying it over the keyboard like you usually do. Anyways! 4...

You can also do a dicepool or a modified die roll, and just give things lift DCs. At this stage in design, you still haven't decided whether lifting capacity is constant, or if you make lifting checks. The admittedly unwritten question is whether it's desirable in a heroic epic (game) for lifting c...

K succinctly pointed out that, in D&D, characters do not get the strength of Hercules very often, much less the ability to hold up a sky (or planet), thus it cannot be reasonably expected. Thus, the system is anulled from consideration by failing the when test, unless you expand it with rules. I...

I am not asking about D&D, so Portable Holes, Handy Haversacks, and discussions of whether characters get very high strength or not in D&D are all completely irrelevant to the question. It's a simple design goal really. A rule that can handle some people being schmucks, some people being Od...

How DO you handle carrying capacity in your game when your characters can reasonably be expected to have the strength of and perform feats like those of Hercules? It is, of course, non-automatic.. so you have to be able to handle people who AREN'T super-strong as well, and who can't even draw Odysse...

Prak, so can being a snarky jerk online. :p The solution to this issue is so patently obvious (discuss calmly with DM or leave game), and similar issues have been discussed so many times previously on every D&D message board in existence that I didn't feel it warranted a sympathetic response. I...

People have been dead for minutes and brought back with little apparent harm, though level loss or Con loss both seem somewhat appropriate. Anyways, it's sure as hell more than 6 seconds, yes, even of flatline. Even still, you're talking about people dead under a half an hour. Raise dead and resurr...

We live in a world with resurrection. CPR has a success rate in the double digits. That's revivify, not resurrection. People have been dead for minutes and brought back with little apparent harm, though level loss or Con loss both seem somewhat appropriate. Anyways, it's sure as hell more than 6 se...