The Gaming Den

You can not define a best or even decent hit percentage (or save percentage for that matter) since that fluctuates wildly, as has been discussed. One thing stays constant though: Every action should be meaningful . That is, any successful action needs to visibly change the state of the game. Also, a...

I don't think you can fix the cleric, or any "healer" class for that matter. At the very least, healing for piddly amounts has to go. I suggest giving everyone healing/curing of some sort. The fighter can get some heroic surge once-per-day-full-HP thing and cure crippling injuries out of c...

Straying away from RPGs: - Richard Garfield designed (among other games) Magic, RoboRally, Netrunner and Jyhad. That is pretty damn solid, even if all of his games I never played are rubbish, which I doubt. - In the same vein John Wick designed Legend of the Five Rings (the CCG), which is one of the...

I suggestusing a 3d6 system. That should work fairly well for making sure that your level 8 PC can beat up the level 6 celestial tigers reliably and that said tigers can in turn eat level 3 guards without breaking a sweat while also making sure that you can not totally ignore something below your le...

I love 7th Sea's version of disadvantages for villains. Villains have vices, which heroes can (blindly) try to activate by spending drama points. A greedy villain might then try to ransom captive heroes instead of executing them, a megalomaniac would start ranting about his plans, and so on.

I still think it is really weird that if I wear a (non-magical) two-handed ax in D3, my frostbolts do more damage than if I wear a (non-magical) dagger. Weird, and not actually required in a game like Diablo, but essential if you want your game to allow multiclassing. If the wizard can get more fir...

The problem with MMOGs is that a lot of their content is not fun to start with. If people would rather pay than level grind your game sucks. With the general design of current MMOs this is unavoidable. 1. An MMO needs a critical mass of players or it fails. 2. That in turn necessitates people to ke...

Kaelik is right. You don't want it making decisions on whether or not to kill people. You build it right in that it can't fucking kill people. I'm not even sure that is possible . How do you define "killing people"? What are people? What is killing? I am not even talking about the difficu...

I doubt it is even possible to get a program to be sufficiently malleable for humans to consider it to be capable of learning without it also being capable to change just anything about itself. I realize "never harm a human" is a classic, but that is actually incredibly hard to pull of. Re...

You can not always bring everyone up to speed though. In DnD you literally can not bring a straight fighter up to the level of an optimized caster will bring to the table. And even a prestiged-to-the-gills warrior type character using 20 books and being handed three times the equipment of the caster...

Open Office should be able to do the job. "Walls of text with occassional blocks of art" pretty much describes any RPG Manual ever. You will want to have quite a bit of whitespace per page, but that is something you work out once and then you use that template for everything. Alternatively...

Those assumptions and CR rating have been extremely useful and - with the exception of some outliers - been decently accurate. As far I can tell even the places where CR was clearly off were just instances of wrongly assigned CR and not the system itself being at fault. As far as I can tell 3Es CR s...

So yeah, I agree with the assessment that "We beat Adventure XYZ without breaking a sweat" is anecdotal at best and holds only an indication of actual skill involved. But even that is useful information. Given that +2CR = double the challenge (which holds up fairly well in my opinion) you...

Godfuckingdamnit, where does this "but different DMs are different"-argument come from? Why should it matter that different DMs do things differently? Of course they do! So what? We flat-out do not care about cross-campaign adjustments. Guess what, the same fucking DM is different from day...

Again, it's not about comparing balor to goblin, it's about comparing balor played by GM 1 to balor played by GM 2. The differences due to different GMs are big enough to make those encounters too different to treat as providing the same challenge. Of course the encounters are different. But they w...

The point is that the divergence resulting from even small decisions such as deciding who to attack first is so big, you cannot objectively compare two fights and claim their difficulty or challenge was equal. As soon as you have two different GMs objectivity is lost since their skill and expereinc...

Look, these stories flat out don't work with DnD mechanics. In fact most stories do not. This is not surprising because most stories can not transplanted into other settings and still work. I only listed a few examples and then picked the first three and none of them work in DnD. Sure, you can just ...

"Fantasy" is an impossibly broad design space. It includes the Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, the Black Company, the Iliad, Abhorsen, Discworld, Malaz, Hogwarts, Llankhmar, Cthulhu and the Wheel of Time. Any game that deliberately includes all of them will end up even more confused than DnD...

Even with substracting 1 it still scales weirdly TN probability reduction in success probability 1 100% - 2 83% -17% 3 66% -20% 4 50% -24% 5 33% -34% 6 17% -48% 7 14% -17% ...repeat ad infinitum Unless the change column looks smooth your system is wonky. The accelerated increase in difficulty in inh...

I had actually heard GOOD things about Kult. Anyway, some of these sound hilarious, I will check them out. Kult does a good job of presenting a nightmarish version of the realworld. The fluff is disturbing, is internally consistent and fits the scope of the game. The mechanics however look horrible...

"Fantasy" is an impossibly broad design space. It includes the Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, the Black Company, the Iliad, Abhorsen, Discworld, Malaz, Hogwarts, Llankhmar, Cthulhu and the Wheel of Time. Any game that deliberately includes all of them will end up even more confused than DnD....

Oh please. In your own words, a big hammer will take a moderately armored character from unhurt to crippled in one hit. We are not even talking about a solid hit or damage enhancers here - just one run-of-the-mill successful attack. And even if our example character purchased extra health levels, tw...

And if he uses a crippling effect/shaping attack you use a perfect soak, as before. AFAICT, perfect soaks still affect only damage, not any 'bad touch' effects like Shaping. That should be perfect dodge of course. You can get all that at character generation - but you can not get anything else if y...

2.5 stinks. Stunts now award fewer motes and perfects cost double, which means you can not spam perfects anymore. Minimum damage also went down from (essence) to 1 - or more realistically to 3-ish for a decent artifact weapon. They also very slightly lowered weapon damage. That's about it. And I ima...

As far as I recall dead creatures return to their original form, yes. And yes, limiting polymorph by CR of both caster and target is probably a good move. And this does help to tone down on the frequency of things breaking. But it does not make polymorph work . As long as you can sift through tons o...