The Gaming Den

Assuming that your GM or whatever won't let you choose multi-powers or pick up tricks that let you reconfigure your powers on the fly, what's the best way to spend your points for maximum combat and adventure-solving effectiveness? Not being able to use alternate powers is very, very rough. Remembe...

Getting into MT 4 levels early is still probably weaker than straight wizard / cleric IMHO. Disadvantages you need multiple attributes (lower dcs, less bonus spells) you'll always be a spell level behind, lower caster level checks (spell resistance, concentration etc.) less high level spells. no cl...

"It's a progressive concept album in the spirit of Rush's 2112 and Pink Floyd's The Wall."

Wow.

Favored Class bonus for extra hit points is kinda nice. And if you play a specific kind of sorcerer, you can spend your favored class bonus on extra spells known. I'm assuming the former is what they were thinking of. Man, I wonder if I could actually get that early-access loophole to fly in the Is...

Speaking of hidden changes, Eldritch Knight and Mystic Theurge can be entered a lot earlier now. Here's the ruling: http://paizo.com/paizo/faq/v5748nruor1fm#v5748eaic9qow So you can go Fighter 1/Scryer Wizard 1/Eldritch Knight +. This is actually a positive change, but if you read the ruling it does...

Ok, this is probably going to sound similar to asking which is shinier between two polished turds, but which tends to be better in pathfinder, a barbarian or a fighter, where "better" is defined as does better damage, is able to handle itself in more fights, and has the lesser trouble bei...

Out of morbid curiosity I've kept reading Mythic Adventures. In a (very abstract) way it reminds me of Bo9S. Not mechanically mind you. It seems like an attempt to see what the fan base will tolerate mechanics wise. A rather timid and ill conceived attempt, but an attempt none-the-less. I'm going to...

You're going to have to refresh my memory. Was there some rage power where you could spend a whole bunch of rage points at once that I'm forgetting about? Pretty much all the current rage power have a limitation of 'once per rage'. With rage points you could spam the same power on every attack and ...

That would explain dropping rage points from the beta. By "dropping", do you mean "renaming"? Because there's little difference between one rage point (in the playtest) and one round of rage (in the final version). The huge difference is that with rage points you could nova if y...

So I read part of Mythic Adventures. What's really galling is that all the mythic versions of fighter feats are what fighter feats should be already. Maybe Paizo is secretly afraid of melee classes that are merely underwhelming instead of sucking outright. That would explain dropping rage points fro...

What exactly do you mean by 'Game Table'? Like some giant LED display that is also a playing surface, or some web-app that shows icons on a grid?

PGI Lied. MWO Died. This is so sad it's come all the way around straight to being hilarious: http://www.starburstmagazine.com/movie-news/6387-gaming-news-mechwarrior-online http://www.gamefront.com/mechwarrior-online-forum-ragesplosion/ http://themittani.com/features/mwo-failure-communicate http://...

I think a tier system can work if all the players are close in skill, like tournament players in a fighting game. And if the things they are rating are somewhat similar, like Ken vs Ryu and not Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit. Since playing with a group of similarly skilled players with similarly powe...

By this analysis, D&D4 should have been much more successful than D&D3. I can't help thinking this analysis nonetheless has some truth in it, and could be applied to quite a few other RPG lines in the last decade. Bear in mind that AD&D3 wasn't necessarily the same game as the D&D 3...

I don't think I've seen it mentioned yet but wasn't Dragon Dice a huge blunder by TSR?

I'm beginning to doubt that the SR5 developers regularly play the game. They seem fine with increasing the size of SR4's already large dicepools, which to me seems to bog down gameplay. For instance they increased the weapon damage codes by ~1.5 and did the same to armour. Armour encumbrance only co...

I got to skim through the 5th edition book recently, it's basically what you expect it to be. I liked them bringing back priorities but everything else was pretty meh. They seem to have lowered the drain on most spells, between one and two points. I don't recall if it's resisted any differently in 4...

I'm a big fan of the Syndicate & Syndicate Wars, but I won't be backing this. Their video raised two big red flags: Sandbox/Emergent behaviour- Some games get this right, a lot of Paradox games for instance. But it is very easy to get this wrong, and it makes missions boring and repetitive. Take...

GitS actually does let people prevent hacking by shutting off their external connections, which is how Section 9 got their asses kicked by the special forces guys. In the GitS:SAC dub they call it going into 'autistic mode'. They don't do it all that often but it does come up. For instance in the 2...

It seems to me that the design team for Shadowrun has really changed since 4e came out and now. Just from the previews I don't think the new crop has the same savvy with mechanics as the old, albeit that may be a limited sample space. So are the good designers being drowned out by the new guys, are ...

I was at my FLGS one day and I overheard this conversation:

Gamer 1: Hey, Gamer 2, you should totally play World of Warcraft with us! We have a new guild and we're just about to reach the end content, it's so great!

Gamer 2: Nah, I don't want to play WoW because it's too much like 4th edition.

So I've been wondering. What are exactly the design goals of Pathfinder? Aside from a few odd quirks to the game engine (no technically empty levels, we have prestige classes, swift actions out the ass etc.) I don't actually see an overarching design philosophy to the game. Unlike, say, 4E D&D....

I wonder if this is going to be another case of internet dick wagging or if people will actually go through the effort to dredge up relevant academic papers.

Posts like that make me think that the Bo9S has erroneously convinced people that the problem with sword-based characters (not the fighter, sword-based characters in general) is that their narrowly-focused fighting powers don't kick enough ass. Not that the problem isn't that supernatural sword pow...

I think this ties into another rant I've been thinking on for a while, and which I won't give in full here, but the basic idea is that D&D needs to stop treating magic apart from nature. Because it isn't, not in the old legends. Only in the past century have we got this idea that in fantasy thi...