The Gaming Den

EDIT: Site error led to double post.

5. Let them play something they understand. Not everyone has to start with Dungeons and Dragons, or World of Darkness, etc.; this is a setting concern, not system. I find that Star Wars is great for introductory games. because virtually everyone already knows and likes Star Wars. Standard fantasy ca...

I find that at heroic tier, the "cut monster HP in half, drop monster level by 1" houserule greatly reduces the padded sumo effect and lets PC's big attacks and critical hits do meaningful damage. "You bloody him" is a lot more exciting to my players than "he looks somewhat...

Listing the same thing twice is confusing, even though the reasoning behind it is sound. That's why there's a "True Neutral", rather than a "Neutral Neutral". To eliminate the redundancy but keep the concept, could not one give a distinct name to the "racial class" vers...

Seems like a simple "DM makes a call" situation to me. Throw some guidelines and examples in the book and I see no need for group decisions.

World Slaying Strike Level: 9 The Soldier attacks every creature they can see. The Soldier makes a standard attack, and this attack is resolved against every target they choose to designate out to line of sight. Make one attack roll and compare to each target's AC, but if miss chances apply, roll f...

At best, I thought the original Dragonlance trilogy was average. Tried to read the first few Forgotten Realms books, but gave up less than half way. I didn't think they were particularly memorable. Even a mainstream hack novelist like Dan Brown writes better books, than most game/fandom related nov...

Nice stuff. Happen to have a Force wizard telekinetic build (i.e. Move Object spam)? I have a character based on that, but I want him to not suck at higher levels.

I was just looking for a rule of thumb; thanks for the elaboration, though. Your responses have been helpful.

You're both right, I should have been more specific. I'm thinking 3.5 here; how large can the bonus for a certain task go above the bonus of other characters of a similar level before it becomes unbalanced, in the case of something that everyone is supposed to be participating in (such as combat). S...

Given, if character abilities diverge too much, they get thrown off either the top or the bottom of the RNG. However, characters are expected to have different capabilities, with various areas of expertise that make them work together as a party. How far apart in terms of numerical power can charact...

As rounds get shorter, the ability to have real world events occur goes away. The police have a response time. The cavalry have a response time. Everything has a response time. Poison has a progression time. Bleeding has a progression time. And so on. A very good point. However, I wonder how moveme...

All it really needs is what spycraft 1 did: At level 1 the guards are gangbangers, at level 10 they are special forces, and at level 20 they are ex-special forces with scifi weapons and gadgets. The guard dog goes from being a doberman to a tiger. Functionally they scale to the party. That makes fa...

The first is obvious. and a lot of people think it doesn't matter. But it does. See, the shorter combat rounds are, the less plausible it is that people can talk or get places during fights. Which means that with 3 second or even 6 second combat rounds it is wholly unreasonable that cavalry would e...

Increasing the level of pedantry further, the line is:

"And when everyone's super - no one will be."

I as well agree with your post, however. It galls me that stat replacement allows the functional removal of certain scores as relevant.