The Gaming Den

either way it's unbalanced. [br][br]Unless you make everything mechanically identical - all the races have the same stats, spells work like attacks... - and change the flavor text to provide some sort of reason why someone would want to do something, there will never be balance in this game. The mi...

I'm taking credit for that observation, Ess, dear. You have a spot check of no.



Yeah, Frank... Language filters can be really annoying, but I have to admit that I love your creativity in getting around them. Ass pennies? Priceless.

The only time Ess has ever emphasized a material component in game was when my character was playing some equivalent of Jeopardy and was asked to name a spell crushed diamonds were required for. So, I guess Essence has worked on part B (removing material components). I don't think either of us is so...

If the PC actions are going to be meaningful, that's pretty much how it has to work. You play "the heroes", which means that you are the biggest dick on the human side. If you aren't the biggest dick on the human side, you are the sidekicks, not the heroes. And "cleaning up the monst...

If common people can identify fourth level spells as fourth level spells than why on earth is there a trained-only skill called Spellcraft?

There are 85 different kinds of separate true breeding people in the Monster Manual! The population base of each one has got to be really small. [br][br]Assuming eight billion and divided evenly, each race has approximately 94 million people. How small is small and how big is big? For comparison, t...

I have a plastic mini! My FLGS gave me its rogue after I spent too much money on books and a new set of pretty dice. I totally didn't understand the stats on the card that came with it, and the mini is pretty ugly. That's OK, though. Even though he's ugly, he's a great rogue - I can never find him w...

My basis for my ideas are in large part inspired from the following post (originally found here in this thread):[br][br] For example... you want to play a "heroic, heavily armored knight".[br][br]Fine. Now, you think of what abilities you want your character to have to fit your character c...

How can the concept of what your character is suck if you are actually participating in a game with other people and adventuring?[br][br]Unless your character concept is some guy who's below average at everything in life, has no friends, and spends the time he could be out in the world dropping any ...

Class balance is always going to be a joke, so long as you try to balance a class instead of a power. [br][br]No... So long as powers are different, balance won't exist. So long as players are different, balance won't exist. So long as you have a plethora of choices, balance won't exist.[br][br]It ...

You may want to check out some of the class variants of the druid in Unearthed Arcana .[br][br]According to UA, page 58, a Druid's armor and shield proficiency + all forms of Wildshape is approximately equivalent to gaining a monk's unarmored bonus and Wis to AC, fast movement as per monk, favored e...

Generally speaking, a cinematic move loses whatever quality it is that makes it cinematic when it become a regular tactic. [br][br]I don't consider Sailor Moon's happy scepter of disintegration to be cinematic. It's her finishing move. If you want your character to have a finishing move, then you as...

"No Arcane Healing" isn't really a rule in D&D.

Cinematic is the flavor text - that's the players' and DM's job.[br][br]Personally, I prefer a system that lets me think up the cool stuff. Most of the time I think their ideas are dumb and don't make sense, and while to other people, my ideas might not sound much better, they at least work for me.[...

The boards have been subtlely wigging out. A couple of days ago on Nifty, the boards weren't registering how many people were online and who they were. Usually, there's one person online - the one reading the line on the screen - but for about 6 hours it didn't register anyone.[br][br]The boards - e...

And certain skills should be easier to pick up than others. It should be fairly easy to learn how to swim well, much easier than say... use magic device. [br][br]I agree and disagree. [br][br]In real life, people are innately better at some things than others are. To add further detail to the skill...

fbmf wrote:By that I mean if a guy who uses no equipment was just as effective as the guy with crazy badass armor and weapons, why be the equipment guy?

Sword-chucks, yo.

RC wrote:The fighter's main thing should be taking damage, not dealing it.

I thought the class was called the fighter. He's supposed to fight, not shield. If they wanted him to withstand everything, wouldn't they have called him the defender?

Personally, when we decided to make DCs for spellcasters this way, we did it for everything - abilities given by prestige classes, monsters, etc. [br][br]It has had a few effects: there is only one mechanic that determines a special ability's DC, low-level spell slots can still be useful at higher l...

Ess and I do that in our games (10 + 1/2 Character Level + Stat), and it makes spells stay more useful - why use a Mass Charm when a Charm Person will do? If the saves are the same, then a lot of the lower level spells don't go out of style as quickly.[br][br]And, of course, there's my love of epic ...

Well, I keep going back to this because it's important. Hit points represent a character's ability to turn a greater wound into a lesser one. [br][br]Actually, I wasn't even referring to hit points. I was referring to the ability that a person has - in real life, even - to know when one thing hurts...

That's why I'm saying when you suddenly start taking out of character actions based on other stuff, you're now metagaming. [br][br]You and I have serious differences when it comes to what our characters would and wouldn't know. Your character motivations like this one:[br][br] and he's likely to ca...

The point is that there's a chance you could die, and you chose that profession over something else. Sure, it's not exactly that high risk, but it's a lot more high risk than most of us are used to. [br][br]I spent my 13th birthday in Africa. I went not to help anyone but myself - because I wanted ...

And once your character's acknowledge that it's an automatic miss, you're basicalyl into metagame land, [br][br]You can't acknowledge ever that it's an automatic miss. You can acknowledge that after 3 tries, you haven't hit the guy. Hopefully, your character will think something to the effect of &q...

This word gets used a lot on D&D boards, but what does it really mean? What is your definition of metagaming? What are examples that you've seen of this? Is there a standard definition that most gamers agree upon?