The Gaming Den

Can we just talk Initiative at this point? Because the complexity/time resolution thing with Initiative is fucking confusing to me. Is there really that much of an downside to doing fixed initiative or group initiatives so PCs and NPCs act at different times?

Has anyone suggested that the surge of DnD podcasts using 5e (Critical Roll, Adventure Zone) also might be responsible for the popularity of 5e? Everyone I know who got into DnD also knows of/listens to at least one of those podcasts. It's probably two separate things: an increased interest in DnD a...

Has anyone taken the "get rid of Perception+Animal Ken+Sabotage and plan for skill soft classes" thing on yet? There's http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=487902#487902 which is a good reference for what the initial Disciplines would look like. I'm imagining each Discipline having 1-2 Stats a...

I think you could dispel Talents - you're basically cutting off their connection to their power source. So a War Formed werewolf could be forced back to normal by throwing Salt on them. The Talent/Sorcery distinction is good to me although I imagine that the question with them isn't "Magical?&q...

Can players even learn Innate/Passive/Intrinsic (lol yikes) Disciplines without something happening to them?

Keeping a Spell/Talent distinction makes sense if Spells require you to read a dusty tome or have a wizard teach you it.

Does the genre matter here or are action economies somehow "narrative agnostic"?

Gonna push this thread up to note some terminology suggestions and raise a question about how to display information about Discipline Skill/Stat recommendations. Remove spells as a category of powers. Powers that were not spells before (passive powers) are now intrinsic powers. As noted in the "...

Wow. That is a terrible fucking format for answering rules questions, especially with all the other crap and advertising in there. It's actually worse because it's a compilation of answers to rules questions; (afaik) there isn't actually an official medium for it. I don't think Truesight counters I...

https://www.sageadvice.eu/2015/07/17/illusory-reality-2/ So the proper reading of Illusory Reality is the former one, even though it is very badly written. I still don't know whether you can make the object real at cast-time or only as a bonus action after the spell is cast. Either way - it is stron...

Even if you could make it work, it would be just as much effort and a lot more confusion for your players than learning a new system. That reminds me the reason I originally got burned out of d&d years ago. I'm never again playing a game where you need more houserules than core rules. It really...

The "slow advancement" thing isn't a premise, sorry, it's more like what the system forces on you because of bounded accuracy. As in, level 5 to level 10 is not that much of a power jump. From what I gather, 5e doesn't really do high fantasy that well because at the highest level you're st...

This sort of presumes that we're going to tell a low-fantasy sort of story, that characters are going to progress pretty slowly, that the DM is going to pull out bullshit stops to prevent Minionmancers from steamrolling bounded accuracy. Yes, I know, "just use a different system", but my p...

A more pressing issue for this idea specifically is that individual domains are rarely balanced, and pretty much never balanced across multiple levels. There are no domains I can think of that give level appropriate abilities at low, medium, and high levels. Clerics are able to be effective by volt...

It's an interesting idea but I really don't think it goes far enough. As Judging__Eagle and Zaranthan note, just make everyone magic instead of trying to fix martials by throwing them a bone. (Of course, you have to nerf the prime magic users in order to distribute the magic equally among the classe...

What's the benefit of a "Track" over something more like a Feat chain? Call them "Traits", make them not helpful in combat, hand them out every N levels. The chain aspect lets you build something like a Track, level requirements let you dole out more high-powered non-combat utili...

good stuff to read, the idea that "most systems are shit use whatever the players and you know" is def interesting. me and a friend DM 5e and we are bitch a lot about the thinness of the rules but it definitely has the advantage of being fairly simple to introduce to people. but the ASI/fe...

... how? I mean, yeah, the group can fluke the DC 13 save (because 5e saves are bullshit), but they're also shit at sneaking AND stuck to the place they died. What bizarre circumstances lead you to snoozing in a banshee haunted area? Stealth rules in DnD 5e are handwavy as hell and the "stuck ...

how do i get caught up on the 10+ years of RPG game design discussion on here? most notably: * making martials less shitty, making casters less godlike * why is Pathfinder a downgrade from 3.5e * why should i use 3.5e over any other system? are there other good systems for sword+sorcery settings? * ...

okay yeah i get that dnd 5e suffers from "let's put the onus on the GM to mind caulk our thin system" but is there a more detailed explanation somewhere? the thinness of dnd 5e means that i don't really have to learn that much to get a game going; 3.5e has a higher ceiling for sure but it ...

as a fledgling DM i find DnD 5e's complete lack of rules amenable to a style of "i just make shit up". and the people I DM haven't chosen to just break the system by hiring a bunch of lil guys and/or becoming necromancers the whole "caster supremacy" part of 3.5e kind of bums me ...

sorry, wait, the exact opposite

the entire point of a TTRPG system is to scold players and DMs into following the narrative structures you want instead of putting into place rules and incentives that promote those narrative structures

a good thing abt playing for the Technocracy instead of against it is that "maintaining the status quo by solving problems" is something that is doable, compared to "let's overthrow the fucking government" which your party is never going to manage

So, uh, legit unrelated question about trans people. Is it transphobic to ask what organs people have before sleeping with them, or is there something I'm missing from the earlier exchange? if they trust you enough to sleep with you they'll almost certainly let you know they're trans i feel like th...

When you ask people on this forum questions, they don't answer them. FrankTrollman has, in fact, actually advised people not to answer questions as apparently he thinks honesty is some sort of trap. (That person went ahead and answered questions but eventually refused after a while.) Once someone d...