The Gaming Den

True, but that's because CRs suck, not because a particular character or party sucks. I'm taking it for granted that a DM is better at balancing encounters than the MM is, because really that's not very hard.

Because there are more differences between daggers and longswords and greatswords than just how big they are. If you take a butter knife and increase its size until it's 2 feet long, it doesn't become a shortsword. You could use it like one, if you really wanted to, but it wouldn't be the same. That...

Stop trying to justify your gimpitude by shifting the blame to the DM. You're missing the point entirely. I'm not trying to justify the guy who wants to play a Fighter in the party of CoDzillas -- he's a jackass bringing the team down. But at the same time, the guy playing a CoDzilla in a party of ...

Fun fact: a character "sucking" is entirely relative to other members of the party. Really. We're talking about tabletop games, here, not computer games or MMOs or something. Literally everything in the game is tailored specifically to the group playing. This is why you have a DM; to make ...

The towers were hit with airplanes which exploded and then burned uncontrolled for hours.

You have a very strange definition of "fragile".

Here's the thing. In my world, having a pixie thief sneak up behind an orc guard, steal his dagger, and stab him in the back is cool . Even if the dagger isn't magical. Why would you ever want to give up that option? There's no reason they can't do that; they just take a penalty for using an inappr...

It seems to me that the way to fix this problem is to fix magic item crafting . As it stands in 3e, magic item crafting takes a shit-ton of gold, 1/25th a shit-ton of XP, and a long-ass time. Set them all on fire, and out pops a magic item (oh, but only if you have the right feats, too). This is ret...

An easy way to accomplish what Anguirus is talking about: establish a time limit for missions. If you only have three days to get to the Caves of Death and wreck the place, then you have to keep going even if the wizard novas all his useful spells on the pack of wolves you run into on the way there,...

So, basically, rather than responding to Heath's point, you're ignoring it. Great. Take a look at your own list. In the eight years before 9/11 (to match the eight years since then), there were no "major" terrorist attacks by Islamic terrorist groups in the US, and there was exactly one ag...

Eternal Sonata is good, but long-winded from what I've seen so far. You can safely skip the worst bits of that (the between-chapter history lessons on the life of Chopin); it has nothing to do with anything that actually happens in the game, and you can always go back and read it (at your own pace,...

A few hundred people -- terrible though it is -- isn't even the same order of magnitude as what happened on 9/11... which is exactly what Heath was trying to point out. Saying "there hasn't been another 9/11 scale attack, we must be doing something right!" is fallacious because it assumes ...

That's 4cp per pound of wheat, if you want it factory produced by a wizard in kingdom-sized units every two days from now untill forever. Well, given that (presumably) naturally-grown wheat is worth 1 cp/pound according to the SRD , that seems reasonable to me. It's cheaper to make wheat the old-fa...

NativeJovian , I don't follow. It says "When you take nonlethal damage, keep a running total of how much you've accumulated." Since it says that you only keep track of how much nonlethal damage you have when you take nonlethal damage, when you haven't taken any, you don't keep track of it...

" When you take nonlethal damage, keep a running total of how much you’ve accumulated. " That means before you take any nonlethal damage, you don't have zero nonlethal damage, your nonlethal damage is "none", similar to the distinction between ability scores and nonabilities. -72...

I accept that the designers intended things that are not in the rules. I do not accept that we should attempt to divine their intent and play by it instead of the actual rules. So it doesn't matter if my HP is -72, I'm still in the fight because there's no rule that says you can't take actions whil...

Oh, so Solid Stone Statues are creatures now? Yes, if they're people with the Statue spell cast on them. It specifically says that they can see/hear/smell normally, which means that they have a wisdom score (" Any creature that can perceive its environment in any fashion has at least 1 point o...

I'm not with you on your desire to merge skills that achieve the same effect. Diplomacy and intimidate are different skills, and while they do both serve to get information out of people one leaves them pretty pissed at you afterwards. Is that not a meaningful distinction? Sure it's a meaningful di...

We can either go with the actual rules, or we can go with 'intent.' This is retarded because it results in stupid shit like "there's no rule that says I can't take actions while dead!". Some common sense needs to be applied to the interpretation of the rules. Why the hell would they write...

On the subject of skill consolidation, I can see two reasons to combine skills: because they're never used separately (eg hide/move silently) or because if you're good at one, you should probably be good at the other too (eg spot/listen, balance/tumble). The way I see it, skills should be described ...

ubernoob wrote:It just doesn't function the way you want it to.

That sounds like another way of saying "broken" to me.

If he wants to make houserule changes, let him. No one's forcing you to do the same, and if it makes him happier to play it his way, what do you care?

Regardless of Kaelik being needlessly dickish, he has a point. It's much easier to steal rules from other areas of the game and apply them to flight than it is to invent your own flight-specific rules. Most of the environmental hazards of combat on the ground can be replaced by the hazards of fallin...

Additionally, Animated Objects do not benefit from hardness at all The fact that Animated Objects entry explicitly states that they still have whatever hardness they had before they were animated, I think we can safely agree that the writers intended them to benefit from it. At which point we're fo...

A_Cynic wrote:No, I don't think it pretty clear that Animated Objects are considered creatures.

They have a creature type. It's "construct". Why would it be a construct (which are creatures) if it wasn't a creature?

I like the idea of a Fly skill more than the current "maneuverability" system, certainly. I would use the current system as a guideline (eg, average or lower must maintain at least half their speed as forward movement, so "avoid stall" would be a relatively low DC check, "ho...

It's pretty clear that an animation object is considered a creature. It can also be reasonably assumed that objects and creatures are mutually exclusive, and the process of animating an animated object turns it from an object to a creature (the same way turning a corpse into a zombie or turning a pi...