The Gaming Den

Also, the Exile series, dunno about the Avernum remakes though. E2 even had a spell or ability to let you recharge your wands. Having said that, whilst more or less all fantasy RPGs borrow from D&D, Exile was very big on that. Avernum definitely still has charged wands, though they tend toward ...

"Medicine in D&D Land is explicitly a reusable magic ritual that isn't subject to mortal limits of how much you can heal how quickly" would be convenient for gameplay and allow for parties without a cleric or "person able to use CLW dildos". Doubt they're intentionally going...

virgil wrote:Cast ethereal jaunt, wield a bow, attack all enemies in the Material plane with impunity.

Does this work? If not, why?

Is "[a]n ethereal creature can’t attack material creatures" unclear in some way?

WiserOdin032402 wrote:I personally don't think 5e deserves that prize, given that I remember even 4e put out more material.

What percent of an average D&D edition is 5e, if we measure by number of sourcebooks? How much worse does that get if we measure by rules content inside those sourcebooks?

Granted, this isn't 4e where basic tasks scale. The wall you climbed earlier doesn't ever level up. The guards don't level up. However, your ranks in all your skills level up with your level, and given dex is the current god stat, fighters are a whole lot sneakier in this edition. Is it not? If the...

WotC has a big marketing survey up via Facebook. The latter half is all about what kind of promotions they should put out, but the first bit seems targeted at trying to figure out the audience they should design for. Maybe it's portentous of some kind of product/edition change?

Critical Success & Failure: The people I play with always love the fact that nat20 = critical success & nat1 = critical failure. Whenever it isn't a rule (like with D&D 3e skill checks), they want to houserule it in. Whenever I play with a different RNG like 3d6, one of the biggest comp...

I haven't noticed anyone expressing interest in weapon golf bags at high levels. Those players seem more drawn to spell toolbox classes like the Wizard. Based on that limited experience, my gut tells me that the best solution involves giving low-level enemies some mundane weaknesses for the golf-ba...

Now here's the bad part: a Mighty Ritual of Vast Power becomes boring if used repeatedly. Once achieved, the ritual wants to either become institutionalized or dropped entirely. It's fine to go on a three adventure quest to get a ritual going, but you aren't going to want to do those three adventur...

So....you've just described the essential mechanics of Cultist Simulator. Learn lore, use lore to recruit followers, send followers on missions, read the books brought back from missions, learn more lore, eventually do rituals and stuff with the lore and the artifacts you find on missions.

I read that differently, the "they" referring to the barbarian, not the actions. IE, Barbarians get Rage Traits, like PF1 Rage Powers, and one allows them to take Concentrate actions. Oh, yes, this is another possible interpretation. In term of grammar, the preview uses the singular for &...

A fixed bonus you identify getting the bonus, and add the value to your result. A variable bonus you identify getting the bonus, get the appropriate physical die, roll the dice, maybe have one of the dice roll off the table and have to get re-rolled, read the dice, and add the value to your result....

It's a 2d10 system apparently, with randomized d4 modifiers, but I'm not seeing any actual resolution numbers. Am I just missing somewhere the document lays out skill targets?

I'm curious, the system's math is awfully fiddly to transfer to a tabletop model. They did have the decency to differentiate resource mechanics to some degree though, which is encouraging.

jt wrote:You don't want any duplicate cards - part of the selling point of these games is that the writers did most of the being clever for you.

This is not a given premise. Funemployed uses the call and response system but lives and dies on player creativity.

Fantasycraft has a clever take on the underlying meta currency for these. You can spend "action dice" on base rolls that fall inside an enemy's error range (tarts at 1, can be modified worse with certain conditions) to cause critical failures, or can spend them on yourself when you roll in...

I didn't even know the Paizo one was a thing. Is it any good in physical or digital form? The digital form is a pretty decent tablet or phone casual game for a single player. The multiplayer coop in real life is a bit dull, and the rulebook is a poorly written mess, so it can be difficult to resolv...

I've never considered that to be a fair criticism. You can still know if you are an expert mountain climber for a given context , so why should the fact that there exist greater challenges outside your context be so offensive? If I'm able to climb K2 on Earth, I know I'm a pretty badass mountain cl...

If you're just looking at combat math, that's very different than skill rolls. For skill checks, there's other options than just keeping everyone so tightly in lockstep. Consider mechanics that let players share or swap bonuses (Fantasy Craft has a class that does this, and it feels pretty good beca...

So yeah, you can standardize things between skills, but just keep in mind that all you're actually doing is making sacrifices to the OCD gods. Skills aren't equally valuable, and there's no particular reason that they should be treated the same on any particular axis. Does that matter more for givi...

Goodman Games to update old 1E modules for 5E. That's one way of putting it. Seems like it is a luxury collector's hardback with umpteen different versions of B1 and B2, together with lots of interviews, commentary and extra encounters. I can't see anyone buying this strange accumulation of dispara...

Tracing is perhaps the single biggest direct rules change in Android: Netrunner. It's no longer a blind simultaneous bid. Instead the corp spends as much as they want, and the runner can then choose to match it or suffer the consequences. There's a pretty thriving tournament scene for the modern gam...

You've got the action numbers a bit off. Runners have 4 actions, corps only get three, but start their turn with a mandatory draw as a pseudo 4th action. Given that agendas take time to score, additional actions are of considerably more value for the corp than for the runner, because they decrease t...

We taught my sister-in-law and her husband how to play last weekend. He innately adopted this strategy and kicked all of our asses, twice. I was trying to play this style side-by-side on my own to see how it paced, but it seems a lot harder in a two-player game (with just four gems of each color). ...

Is there a way to represent a character being particularly good with one given spell, without getting too fiddly? The best option that comes to mind is using a specialization system in skills and allowing spells to be areas of specialization. Is there a better option? If you want that sort of speci...