The Gaming Den

Your goals, even if they were actually good goals to have, and not at best neutral, aren't worth the work you put in to get them. Also, why the fuck D10s? I mean, it's better than d12s, but worse than d6s and d20s for having that number of dice, and feeling D&D respectively. Would it really be ...

Another RNG thread? Really? Yes. So, with the current RNG system (d20+bonuses vs DC), and the usual situation (the number that actually matters in most cases is not a probability of succeeding, but rather an average number of attempts between failures/successes), the +1 bonus can actually have a va...

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2l7ns&page=1236?Ask-James-Jacobs-ALL-your-Questions-Here#61777 "5) what do you think abut the martial/caster disparity at high levels? James Jacobs wrote: 5) I think it's a myth propagated by people with agendas. Do you still feel this way? ಠ_&#323...

Eh. If you want to give people spells, give them spells. D&D's spell-level slot system works pretty well. Meanwhile, no one at all cares if you roll a die to jump 10,000 miles or 15,000 miles, or what it would mean to roll for knowing everything rather than almost everything, or why you'd want ...

It is indeed more usable to calculate it in number of rounds until failing a save; applying that to my previous example, the numbers are: - Easy save (75% chance to succeed) = 4 average rounds until failing a save, which increases to 6.67 rounds with cloak of resistance +2, a 66% increase. - Moderat...

I mean sure, the PF creative director will tell you, you don''t need stat boosting items, but everyone knows that is basically a lie. You don't need cloaks of resistance to "live" though, unless your GM is particularly into a sort of "arms race" type of game. The effect of not h...

But a system like that is really quite a lot of head space to deal with, and does need big skills to go along with it. No one at all is going to give a shit if you have Legendary Rope Use, or Knowledge(Local), or Jumping, or Survival. Legendary Jumping is very much not in the "no one is going ...

For your hypothetical tiered system, I'd suggest you have 2 columns for that table. The one you presented could be "Normal D&D", and they you could have "Weaksauce D&D" for the people that want to play their Lord of the Rings fanfiction. They get the 5 tier differentiati...

Discuss. I think that in a 5 tiered system, where Tiier 5 represent the absolute top, and without invoking the "harder to jump obstacles" D&D 4e garbage, the typical Jump skill challenges (for example) should probably look like this: Tier 1 jump - jump 5 feet from normal surface Tier ...

OK so evidently it's me who's a fucking blind idiot and hasn't read his own posts properly. Well, off to the barrel I go.

1) Because it's not about the D&D skill system or any hypothetical replacement in any way shape or form on any tangential level? I mean, if I made a post that was just "4e SUCKS" 500 times in a row in every thread, I would be correct in every single thread, but it would also be a wast...

I think all of this is a waste of time in this thread. You are at best disagreeing with a specific implementation of Frank's point about iterative probability. Even if you were 100% right about the specific threat levels and death chances and XP gain of 3e, that still wouldn't have any effect on th...

The work is already done. In 3E/3.5E, a level-appropriate encounter for parties of 4 characters of level X has Challenge Rating X, which feels superficially "fair" by design . But a CR X encouter is actually one NPC of character level X. A "fair" fight in D&D is you outgunni...

No. The issue is that in such a situation the fail state is the only state, which means that the game either lacks tension or the MC shits all over the players with nothing in between. Roleplaying is slight of hand, with the goal being to present the levels of risk as being much higher than they ac...

Without a random element, the trap filled hallway is - at best - the game of "guess what number I am thinking of." And that is a terrible game that is also terrible for human relationships between the player and the MC. If searching for things and not finding them has potential negative c...

Well, my take on the player agency and dice argument is that, while technically you can have a diceless game with players having lots of agency, it wouldn't be a game with a GM at all. A normal diceless table-top game, like chess or checkers, is like that, and they work pretty well. But a game with...

Well, my take on the player agency and dice argument is that, while technically you can have a diceless game with players having lots of agency, it wouldn't be a game with a GM at all. A normal diceless table-top game, like chess or checkers, is like that, and they work pretty well. But a game with ...

It's almost certainly better than the 3e inane "if you failed to bash this door once, you are magically forbidden from trying it again until you level up!" bullshit. I'm not sure if this example was simply random, or if it was purposely selected. Either way, I think it's a bad example. Wh...

Speaking of spells, it seems that they already do the job of the skill system far better than the current skill system does, by at least providing you with actual inputs other than "to roll or not to roll". It also has far better scaling on its effects. Maybe the Big Skills idea should, i...

Why have dice rolls in combat? You know the final outcome. What are you going to do, declare game over because they rolled poorly? What makes combat, a part of the game with less forgiveness of failure than finding love letters, acceptable to have random elements that Search should not have? Pretty...

Stuff like DOTA2 is where someone figured out you could cut a whole bunch of stupid crap out of Warcraft 3 and make it a much better game (duh, War3 is full of stupid busywork crap), and then that mod got turned into a complete game which very carefully did not add anything to change the play in an...

Why did they even make a custom-race generator, anyway? Was that, like, the thing that people were actually asking for, or was it one of those "lol pathfinder" things that just don't make any sense, like "balancing" fighters/non-magic classes and wizards/magic classes by nerfing ...

Why, in just a few decades you could grow your city into a planar metropolis if you played your cards right. Global conquest or cities covering the world like Dis or Ravnica simply aren't going to be likely outputs of this system. The growth rates just aren't big enough for that kind of thing to ha...

The largest city in the world needs the largest set of controlled farms in the world, and may have to go to war in order to secure more land. Also, neighboring cities may decide that instead of joining The World's Largest City Development Race, they may want to invest heavily in armies and get some...

Gold is a measure of value, not pieces of precious metal. It's possible to increase value even if the metal increases slowly. Most paymental end up being notation on account, with only small transfers. That would still cause inflation, though. The largest city in the world needs the largest set of ...