The Gaming Den

Wait, are you actually in favor of Summon Helpful Dragon? A 4 hp Dragon who can't cast spells and maybe attacks the party? Go nuts. Polymorphing your pet kitten into an ancient gold dragon is pretty much guaranteed to give you a formidable ally who will, at the very least, not attack you. It won't ...

Poly-other gives you the whole non-magic set like 3e, but it's instant, you can't cast any more, save-or-die if you do transform, and save regularly or lose your mind and become an NPC, and save-or-die again if you get it reversed. So, more what you do to a charmed Orc for short-term fun and profit...

You can basically hand out racial powers that are desirable regardless of class, yes. I think that this is pretty much an impossible design goal. I mean, even something as generic as the 4E D&D elf's 'reroll one missed attack once an encounter' is of different utility for different characters. ...

You can basically hand out racial powers that are desirable regardless of class, yes. But your design goals can't include "race x synergizes with class y" without the other races not synergizing with the class. I guess you could conceivably make every race be good at at a narrow field with...

Polymorph is broken in multiple ways: 1. It lets you replace stats. Now your caster can happily assign a 5 to dex and 3 to str, then turn into whatever, even into his own race, and end up with better stats, for the cost of one spell slot. That is bullshit. 2. It lets you get inflated stats meant to ...

Look, your entire premise is ridiculous. You want there to be synergies between races and classes, but you still want every race to be good at everything. That is bullshit. It is flat out impossible. If synergies exist race A is better at something than race B. Period. You can control how much bette...

People who say that there games have "little to no combat" are LYING. Every single person who I have met who said this was completely full of shit. Oh shit, then I must be delusional, because in my current campaign we played for about 20 sessions and had a grand total of one fight scene. ...

For what it's worth, Exalted handles this fairly elegantly. Equipping items requires commiting motes which means you can't use them to power abilities. It still means everyone wants a fair amount of magic items, but not to the extend that you hunt for more stacking bonus types. Of course you can als...

I have yet to see evidence that causing oil spills even hurts oil companies. It certainly won't destroy them. Especially not if it's terrorism, as they'll get to play the victim card. Heck, Halliburton obviously bribed politicians for war contracts and then obviously harmed soldiers through more tha...

Ok then, how would one yahoo with a bomb take down a global corporation? Say, Halliburton.

Remove them, but keep the same structures and you will end up with evil fuckers again in short order. Additionally you can both create and encourage evil and you can hide evil from those making decisions, making it easier and easier to get more and more evil. But the basic idea is this: The structu...

Yeah, the basic concept here is that the upper crust of society, those who wield all the power, are evil in spite of the goodness of the people, even in spite of the dissent of most of the people. But the organs of power tend to keep good-meaning people out of them by their nature or design, or bot...

To clear up the issue with Shadowruns original exploding dice system: The idea behind the system is that your aptitude is represented by your dicepool while the difficulty is decided by the TN. How many hits you score determines degree of success. Nice, simple, obvious. That is, if you can increase ...

Modern Western Society (The real world) You can build a pretty compelling argument for us being an evil society. We rape the planet without a thought for the future. We work to get money which we then use so someone can torture children in sweatshops halfway across the planet we never even heard of...

Dice pool systems are neat and their lack of the swingyness of d20 is something that always attracts me back to such systems time and again. However, I like fantasy rpgs and have never seen a good dicepool fantasy rpg. The issue here is not with bad dicepool RPGs but bad RPGs period. More than 90% ...

So how does that system handle opposed rolls?

Or in other words, game mechanics form the skeleton, fluff is the flesh and MTP the skin. You need all of them to make a decent game, you need them in the correct amounts and in the right place. And all of them need to fit together. And while you night get away with putting flavor and then MTP over ...

So... that thing with the piles of d6s +X and you pick the highest, +1 for each 6 left over after picking the highest... Would it work at all well with d20s? (or d12, or d10, etc) It seems like adding more sides to the type of dice rolled would keep numbers in the "average" range a lot, w...

That xd6+y mechanic definitely sucks. I can already tell that it is incredibly easy to have tasks that a party member can not succeed at, namely anything with a TN of 7+. Heck, if you have anyone with, say, 4d6+4 at the table he is very unlikely to ever roll below 15 or so. At the same time someone ...

I was aware of fighters sucking for quite a while, but it really only hit me how fucking good wizards are when I realized that only picking one spell per level from the PHB and not using any feats, class features or prestige classes you could still pull your weight. Just pick something among the lin...

98%? I wish. If your weakest party member pulls more than half the weight of your strongest one your RPG is either exceptionally well-balanced or you put deliberate effort into party balance. In 3E it's actually hard to get to the 50% spot. Not hard as in "if you don't watch out you end up at 5...

I think it is more that nobody actually really wants 100% balance. And that what 4th gives is generally good enough. But the balance in 3.5 is a real crapshoot. But then again, nobody plays 3.5 raw anyway. Nobody is actively opposed to balance. Some people may not particularly care though. Others m...

One thing to keep in mind about online arguments is survivor bias. In real life you talk to maybe four people at a time. On a message board it's more like twenty people minimum. And quite often the only ones to post will be those who disagree with you. So any time you are having a 10 page discussion...

Well a problem in 3ed was that PC AC scales pretty damn fast so that low level monsters can't hit higher level PCs, even if the difference in levels vs. CR was relatively small. It'd be easier to just keep PC AC from scaling so fast rather than make up new categories of monsters. AC doesn't scale t...

Well to be honest, if you're incompetent and not an asshole about it you wouldn't be able to keep your job. I dunno, someone who does nothing but brainstorm tons of inane ideas with a few gems hidden here and there seems quite useful to me, provided he is able to deal with 90% of his stuff being re...