The Gaming Den

Regarding level thresholds, I had something that divided them somewhat more finely than just "at level X, ability Y comes online." Every tactical ability (eg Invisibility, Flight, Incorporeality; not an "ability" in the game-rules sense, more of a set of them) had three separate ...

I still go by Warrior, Expert, and Caster archetypes, I'm strongly against them. Excluding the "What do spellcasters do ?" question, gestalting those three together for Warrior/Expert, Warrior/Caster, and Expert/Caster works (better). "What do spellcasters do ?" is solved by cut...

Tavish's system could be made (somewhat more) workable, if attributes applied only to defenses; if your Red defense is equal to the number of Red attacks that you know, and your Blue defense is equal to the number of Blue attacks that you know, then, at the very least, you have a reason why you migh...

Seems pretty good. Nothing particularly new, but it's a collection of ideas, not a statement of position.

The Level Progression section reminds me of an email conversation I had with my brother about advancement of abilities; I'll dig it up in the morning, maybe.

Maybe if, the more points you put into a defense, the cheaper it got to raise; so that, if you're raising Fort at the expense of Will, -1 Will buys you +2 fort, or even +1 ref/+1 fort, if your stats are baseline; lower Will and higher Fort might go 1 for 3, 4, or 5 (although you might be off RNG by ...

So there comes a point where one is forced to ask what exactly it is that an "attribute" is supposed to do that is separate from a "skill" and the answer is frankly vague. For TNE purposes I am supposing that attributes represent skill categories and are essentially your default...

On a side note, how do we handle superhuman characters? Is that an option, or should it even be one? Do we want six-foot chalk-white guys to be able to break the grip of minotaurs and Colossal-sized golems? Is there really an alternative? If the minotaur can grab you in its fist, you need to be abl...

One option could be to allow SoD only to work against a creature with X hp or less. That way they become more of a finishing move rather than a rocket launcher from the get go. this would prevent people from killing the BBEG in one round, or having the reverse happening True. That was the intent be...

Rob: We had a few design elements in 4th Edition that took shape early and maintained that shape. Death and dying wasn't one of those elements. We tried at least four different death systems with vastly different consequences. Enough disagreement arose about the goals of a death-and-dying system th...

Actually, you had to finance the building of the castle/temple with your own money before you could attract followers. BD&D also allowed wizards to build a tower and get 1d4 low-level apprentice wizards. Ahh; my 2nd-edition books are 1000 miles away from me, so I didn't have them on-hand to che...

Because if PCs got the idea to actually try to improve the world, they might do something silly, like use their huge amounts of magic to approximate an industrial society instead of kill stuff. A mid-to-high (we'll say 12th) level wizard can, in core: Make a Decanter of Endless Water . Putting this ...

Oberoni Fallacy. Just because the DM can hand you castles and peasants and land and all that stuff doesn't mean that the rules give you those, it means your DM does. 3rd edition has rules by which you can get something not entirely unlike those (Landlord feat in the SBG gives you a castle; Leadershi...

Yeh, rolling HP is cruel. SoDs need a rethink altogether. The value they have to auto-kill weak crap, but auto-killing awesome crap is bad. If you're looking for auto-kills on weak crap, you can just use direct damage. Whether D&D provides big enough direct damage is a different story, of course.

Talisman wrote:

fliprushman wrote:http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drdd/20081010

Just a little focus on their design of 4e's Death mechanics. If it doesn't make you laugh, I don't know what will.

Yeah, error messages sure are funny.

Shows up fine for me.

(e: Response to A_Cynic) I was thinking more along the lines of: Low-Level Adventures: The baron/mayor/chief/wizard/guild contact/magistrate summons you to speak with him. You get there and he asks you to. . . - Slay the wererat that has been sending sewer rats to assault the city. - Investigate the...

If the setting has some one-sentence (or two, or even three-sentence) adventures given for all level brackets of play, or some short descriptions of the kinds of adventures people at each level could do, prominently displayed for DMs, it might work better. Similar to what Frank and K did in the Tome...

What do Light and Darkness have to do with planar power anyway? I've never hear of a 'plane of light' or 'plane of darkness'. I mean, presumably the plane of earth is pretty dark in most places and radiance is pretty bright, but I'm really not getting this ' searing light and deeper darkness are Pl...

If Planar power is one list, won't dedicated "light" or "dark" builds be weaker than "neutral/mixed" builds? That seems somewhat... undesirable. This is fixable; give some sources subsources, so "Planar" is a list, and includes the "Light" and "...

You could, of course, split DR into two numbers, one is a cap per attack and one a cap per round; each attack has an amount taken off equal to the per attack cap, but your DR can only absorb up to the per round cap. Damage reduction 5 (30) would hold against 6 attacks each doing at least 5 damage, o...

It also seems like while a given campaign might be better served by a fairly small number of power sources, the system could have dozens. When making a campaign setting, you simply pick which power sources exist, and which of those are common or rare. Not really any different than the fact that tho...