The Gaming Den

Desperately trying to not make another fighter thread, but for example a 'mundane' surviving a hit from some massive dragon or giant is just overlooked and brushed aside, and so is them hitting said massive superbeast with a standard medieval weapon and hurting it. "Realism" in fantasy is...

Something that bugs me when I dwell on it, is achieving a character concept is often tied to having more hitpoints than a brown bear, or even an orca. Does that ever bug new players? A lot of it is denying multiclass dips, issues of certain abilities just being an X level spell or feat, legacy stuf...

I've also houseruled 5e to Baator and back to make it palatable, and largely second pragma's suggestions, but I do have a few more anecdotes/suggestions: Is there any benefit to tracking multiple advantages/disadvantages? I mean this in two ways: Tracking that if you have two disadvantages and one a...

Emerald, what kind of options were your players looking for with 5e? In general, the whole party were looking for more options at level-up (as opposed to just getting whatever the subclass they picked 10 levels ago was giving them) and more round-by-round options beyond spamming cantrips and melee ...

But what really matters is that since tabletop RPGs are a dying hobby, any system that makes it easier to get newbies to the table has a place. You want a ton of crunchy and complicated options with 30 base classes and 200 optional classes and 1000 spells? No matter how fun it would be, good fuckin...

As for characters being boring and samey... A level 8 paladin/2 warlock can smite for mega damage, use an opportunity attack if anything gets close to either smite or use eldritch blast and blast it backward far enough that it can't attack, cast some boring but very useful low level spells several ...

Which edition of D&D has the best (read: most interesting) form of attacks of opportunity? It depend on how you want to define "best" and "interesting," but I'd say 3e. You get the most AoOs in that edition, you can take feats to do special things with AoOs like stop movemen...

I gotta say, one of the things I hate the most about 5e (not one of the worst things, that list is far too long, just a major pet peeve) is the thing where ability boosts and feats went from things everyone got for free in 3e and 4e to things that take up a slot on the class table in 5e as if they w...

Ok, I'm guessing that "Gygan" comes from "Gigantic" or something, but I'd not be surprised to find our that it's a joke and their king is called Gary or something. It comes from the name of the mythological Greek giants, the Gigantes ; "gigantic" is derived from that a...

There's a bit of a double standard here in that casters expect to have full access to the spell list and to be able to pick and choose, whereas if a fighter brings the same expectation it's frowned on. I know people regularly bitch about the idea that you can walk into a town and trade a bunch of d...

Also Gith the Lich Queen is a 24th level Magic User despite the fact that AD&D did not in fact have rules for level 21+ Magic Users. 1e does, actually, It's 2e that standardized everything to the 1-20 progression. The 1e class table only goes up to 18th level, but the note below says it require...

What I do not recall is whether the title had any reference or meaning in The Dying of the Light, a George R R Martin story from which the Githyanki were copied into AD&D by a young Charles Stross. -Username17 A quick search through a PDF copy shows that "gish" doesn't show up anywher...

Unity wrote:What does "heartbreaker" even mean? It sounds terrible, yet every other person seems to be working on one (or more).

For reference, the term "fantasy heartbreaker" originally comes from this article and the followup here, though it's been expanded/diluted since then.

That's not a problem, coming up with plot threads/hooks/villains. The problem is figuring out the structure - much of the campaign has been some variety of hack-n-slash. I wasn't thinking in terms of plot hooks, just in terms of what kinds of non-hack-and-slash-y adventures would fit the tone best,...

As a general rule, the campaign has been one of episodic quests, largely following the outline of "hear of trouble - seek cause - kill cause" and little in the way of connecting narrative beyond callbacks/references. Could you give a brief summary of the plots and villains they've dealt w...

So, in a hypothetical 3.Hack, it would probably be perfectly fine to say, at least, "if you have Full BAB, you are proficient in all weapons" and "Perform applies to all instruments equally?" Or just scrap proficiency completely, let people just use whatever weapon fits their co...

Wealth by Level is being used as a sort of metonomy for "3.X's economic system" here. The "here is a table of how much gold a character of X level should have" is only a very small part of it, but it's sort of the icon of the overall issue because 3.X predicated a lot of charact...

As for encounters a day, is there any advantage to 3e's "4 encounters a day" thing or would it be better to make it 1 encounter per day? So those on daily schedules don't have to have lots of spell slots. Assaulting a castle I actually kinda prefer as a "running battle" as it we...

Now Hackensack and Secaucus (or Deep, I like Deep) are the odd ones out. I mean, I have no doubt I’ll be able to find or think of some denizens for these realms, but they don’t fit as neatly into my metaphysical origin story for the world. Perhaps the spirit world was only partially ripped off the ...

My magic system still in flux... Magic is hard But right now I have what I call a 3+1 system, and while someone may receive their spells from prayer and religious texts, there is no Divine / Arcane divide, everything just magic. There are 3 major schools with subschools, and 'universal' which inclu...

Ok, but that doesn't fit the aesthetic, now does it? So instead of literally being a centaur, you play a apitaur. That is to say, you use the Tauric template to be a bee-centaur. [...] Another way is to use a Ritual of Unlearning/Vitality to swap your levels/XP for the ECL of a Bee/Wasp Tauric crea...

I've been playing around with a system based on the elements and metaphysical stuff, like several systems described thus far, but instead of having separate elemental and metaphysical spheres like DDMW's or spheres with one element and metaphor each like DrPraetor's, the elements and their metaphysi...

A potion of Wild Shape sounds awesome, and it doesn't need to be a massive combat buff in the first place, as Druids are already very powerful spellcasters. You're right, it doesn't have to be a class-defining major combat buff, but the point is that it currently is and if Prak's trying to turn Dru...

Counterpoint: Cleric is a garbage class and shouldn't exist. To the existent that characters are priests of various gods, there's no reason for them to be the same class. Nature gods can have priests who are druids, sun gods can have priests that are paladins, death gods can have priests that are n...

Clerics get Spells, two Domains, and Turn/Rebuke. So, their features are all established at level one. Druids get Spells, Animal Companion, Wild Empathy and Wild Shape (plus some bullshit small abilities that hardly matter, like pass without trace, resist nature's lure and venom immunity). So, just...