The Gaming Den

Did they have some special setting-specific stats, or are these the same ones from the Humanoid Handbook? The HH minotaur was insane . +2 to Str (and Con?) would let you completely bypass the whole percentile exceptional Str crap. This was nice because the step from a straight 18 to 19 was pretty h...

For some reason I don't understand, the current party line is that Essentials is not a new edition, or even a half-edition like 4.5. According to that party line, I don't know why we are supposed to want to purchase it for money. It's weird. Yeah, I'm wondering the same thing. They're not simplifyi...

Prak_Anima wrote:so have them surrender and offer their gear in exchange for their lives.

Yeah I've actually had lots of PCs accept surrenders, but pretty much none will let enemies run away.

The main issue with letting people run away is generally treasure. If they get away, so do all their minor magic rings, amulets or whatever else they happen to have. It's probably not even stuff the PCs will use, but it is stuff that they can sell. Otherwise whether they get away or not is pretty ir...

Even if it does stack, 10 + spell level + 10-25. Well at level 9 that's not too bad. but at level 9 the sticker price on a wand of MM, CL 9 is about 20% of your TOTAL wealth. By the time it's more reasonable the DC of 20-35 + spell level isn't so hard to hit, and you probably have better things to ...

Anyhow, the DM invited me. I don't really see what their problem is. I hadn't said anything for a half-hour. Any one of my questions could have been answered completely, negating the response. 'Why is it so high?' 'because this guy outclasses your fighter' would have been a sufficient answer. Anyth...

Well most enemies ARE faster than the PCs or otherwise have some means of dealing with runners, so if you run you just die tired. About the only way to really escape is to go zip to some other part of the world. And even that isn't always certain. Often it ends up taking a Deus Ex Machina so you CA...

I took a look back at Iron Heroes yesterday, because honestly, I hadn't checked it out in a long time, and I remembered it as being mediocre back in the day. But as I checked it out with a fresh look, I can really say that it was just plain godawful. It had infinite loops, a spellcasting system that...

"always be compared with gold" is only because of our culture. No it's not. I have literally no idea how many gold pieces my plasma TV is worth. I honestly don't care. We think in terms of dollars, or euros or yen or whatever other paper currency our country uses. But D&D land isn't l...

Doom wrote:I find stances to be pretty mindless, though. They dovetail with the 'everything always works' paradigm to the point that there's no real strategy involved with them.

Well that's the problem with 4E in the first place.

What gold standard? There's no such thing as a fucking gold standard in D&D because there's no such thing as a nation-state unless you're playing in one of the weirder campaign settings like Spelljammer. The fact that every nation takes gold makes it effectively the standard currency. Even if o...

Isn't making the PCs seem bigger than they are sorta the point of D&D though? You want the PCs to feel like they're heroes and beating the odds so to speak, even though as has been stated before... for the game to work, the odds actually have to be in the PCs favor. Sure Rambo is killing tons of...

As was pointed out, there isn't actually a lot of gold sitting around. And because gold is just a bartering good, people could seriously shut you out of the economy by deciding that they don't want gold anymore--same way all of your carpets and glass beads can suddenly not be worth anything. Now gr...

Doesn't sound like much fun for the players. Yeah sometimes as DM honestly you're supposed to do stuff for their own good. Sure I don't mind running sample combats with them to show them that I'm right, but I'm not going to flush a perfectly good story down the toilet to make a point. Seriously fuc...

I've noticed that gamers really love playing Pretty Princess Dressup with their characters. Especially the boys. That said, I think bundling the DDI with some kind of Character Visualizer application would be a great idea. I bet you could get people excited about playing your game RIGHT NOW if you ...

Hell, the king stamping the coins likely ups their value from flat gold because a minted coin is a lot harder to fuck with. Those little ridges? Keep people from cutting them down without notice, means they're vaguely a uniform amount of gold. The complicated stamps means it's from the mint, and co...

Also, you can end-run around regicide for profit by simply moving from a precious metals = cash system to currency. Killing the king is a stupid idea, because in doing that, his reign ends, and his currency becomes useless unless some other entity (the adventurers?) are willing to supply the releva...

FrankTrollman wrote: Yes. Wraith strike is by itself a bigger deal than the entirety of the Book of Nine Swords.

Yeah pretty much. ToB has a single broken power, and that's White Raven Tactics. Everything else is unimpressively useful or straight up sucky.

Book of the Nine Swords isn't an option. They revile it almost as much as Tome for being overpowered. I'd like to consider role to though. I can't just give him a +X to attack and damage, because that leaves him looking like the party rogue without disable device, and the one thing he is good at (j...

I'm not quite sure how that's easier than just going out and fighting dragons. Of course the king himself is a weakling, you just gank him. But why don't assassins just do that? He has resources. All that money that goes toward his armies and guards and whatnot goes toward....armies and guards and ...

The easiest explanation I've found that works for me is 'too small'. Consider all those Kings and whatever, level low teens to mid teens. It's not that there isn't a single level 15 character who could kill him and take his stuff (kingdom) or multiple lower level guys who can work together to do th...

erik wrote: In Indianapolis. I have a stay at home wife, a mortgage, car payment (other car is paid off), wife's student loans, a 18 month old and another baby on the way. Am doing fine with well under $50k/year.

Wow, that's some nice budget balancing there.

This set up results in a world where high level characters can be high level, but do not personally pursue their objective on the Prime - why take the risk and loss of power? - Instead they send and recruit proxies to handle their objectives on the Prime for them. The main problem I see with this s...

One can enjoy playing a system despite its flaws, but they are still flaws . Nobody is saying they're not. The point of the discussion is that a flawed game with a lot of elements people like and get excited about is superior to a dull game with few flaws, because you remember the things you like m...

Strengths invariably do outweigh weaknesses, because ultimately we remember the things we like about a system. Yes, we complain about what we don't like, but what we like is what brings us to it. A game has to be interesting and have potential in the first place for people to play it at all. 4E for ...