The Gaming Den

I have a much simpler proof that "you" will never make D&D next. People won't accept D&D Next Unless it's printed up by WoTC, or whoever owns the D&D license. Even Pathfinder is Pathfinder, and not D&D. WotC is not hiring designers for D&D. Even if WotC was hiring, prob...

Also your customers can't tell you that they want something if they don't even know it's an option. People won't tell you they want extra chunky pasta sauce if you never discuss chunks.

Would it be balanced to have core spellcasting classes grant spells of level 1 through 3, and prestige spellcasting classes grant spells of higher levels without advancing the lower level spells at all? If you go Wizard -> Doomlord, your spellcasting caps out at third level spells, but you get acce...

The flooding the market thing actually is a problem that I didn't have any elegant solution for. If 9th level PC's can make NI gold and 13th level PC's can make NI Iliaster then you could create a situation where a party of 16th level PC's said "We want to buy everything in the world, pay ever...

Bounded accuracy just means putting caps on modifiers people can get. You can cap attack and skill modifiers at +20, and cap defenses and spell DC's at 30 and you've got Bounded accuracy. I don't even know if that's a bad thing, since it pretty much says "People are not allowed to blow the RNG ...

My hatred of the show crystallized when I came up with the phrase "Nerd Minstrel Show"

The difference is that in prior editions all those bullshit items just kind of hung around. And you could give them away or parcel them out to the garrison of your keep. In 3E you were mathematically forced to trade all those items in at the magic mart for an additional +2 to your gloves of dex or w...

"We are Nerds!" jokes aren't the problem. Troy and Abed do lots of "We are Nerds!" jokes and it's fine. Good, even. The problem with Big Bang Theory is that the protagonist character is a self loathing nerd . The best example of this is Secret Agent Laser Obstacle Lunch . It's a ...

Once you get to the next tier, the prior tier is supposed to be irrelevant. So probably anyone with at least 10 Mana is capable of crystallizing Iliaster out of the air, or forging illiaster directly into items they craft.

You can put guns or no guns in the setting. The argument (as far as I understand) is that if you're going to have no guns in a world where guns exist there needs to be a reason beyond "because".

No, the actual reason why no one in Harry Potter brings a fucking gun to any of these life or death battles is that JK Rowling didn't want them to. The idea that because JK Rowling did not bother to justify something means it cannot possibly be justified is inane. Likewise the argument that because...

Flaming Swords are your intro magic items. Their Iliaster cost is 1, 2 if someone is crafting it for you cause you have to pay the Crafter and they are in the Iliaster economy too. You are correct that 16th level characters will have badass magic weapons and not intro magic weapons but intro magic ...

Shattering or draining magical items will net you half the Iliaster it took to make them rounded up I've never quite understood why it's so important to make magic items only worth half their value if you're trying to turn them into other items. I can see some argument that finding magic items feel...

A levels system is a form of point buy, the "points" are just levels, instead of build points. The major advantage of levels is that it allows you to create "package deals" of abilities and base the "price" on their synergy, rather than price everything individually. So...

Three major contributions: 1) If there's any oversight of the design process at all it's probably coming in the form of play sessions in a misguided attempt to ape the M:tG dev cycle. But an RPG is going to seem fine if you simply have active players and an engaging MC, no matter how terribad the ru...

It's really not.

If the button simply doesn't exist then there's no mechanical requirement that the thing happens. But as soon as the players have a "don't get screwed over" button, the implication is that the MC is actually obligated to screw them over if they don't press it.

1) Monster feats should be iconic things; Breath fire, shadowstep, dimdoor, etc. And not, +1 to overrun. 2) Give a CR kicker value for feats. So you know what adding shadowstep to a bullet does to it's cr. I agree with K, this is such a fundamental departure from what feats are supposed to do in 3....

The name of the government during KotOR was "The Republic", it's not officially "The Old Republic" until after Return of the Jedi, when The New Republic" is established and retroactively renamed the prior one (kind of like WWI was The Great War until WWII happened). But sayi...

You still need something to handle large numbers of auto damage units. Do 1000 units with a damage 10 aura do 10,000dmg/round?

No real reason except that it lets a +1 to a skill roll be the same size as a +1 to a die roll and allows "social defence 15" to be directly comparable to "AC 15". I'd really prefer to keep "skill checks" as a d20, and then remap the result to represent some other die i...

Did you actually just try to claim that the only way to simulate granularity/abstraction of say, a Climb Check, without a skill+roll mechanic would be if people were willing to "do the action that is being handicapped" and actually try and climb on the fucking ceiling with variable amount...

I just remembered a LARP where one guy was playing a grandmaster chess player, and to represent that he got abilities that let him "cheat" in the game (double move, revive a piece, that kind of thing). So you're right that you don't need to roll a die as part of roleplaying "Guy bette...

I was really just talking about combining attacks so that PC's can't swim naked through the orcs and ignore them completely. If the orcs have a +5 attack bonus and do 1d12+7 damage, then a guy with AC 26 and DR 20 is pretty much immune to them, especially if less than 50 of the orcs can actually mak...

And now you're off the rails. Rolling dice and comparing them to numbers is literally the difference between MTP and a functioning conflict resolution mechanic. Climb, Balance, and Jump can be reduced to abilities because they're just movement modes and it's actually super weird to have a climb spee...

It doesn't even matter if those abilities then require checks. You just took your entire argument, wiped your ass with it, and threw it over the fence of a school yard. There is literally no difference at all between giving someone an ability that requires a check to activate and giving someone an ...