The Gaming Den

K, how much of "Method 3" did you finish? It seems to use the SRD attribute adjustments rather than 'subtract the elite array' and, for races that don't have many abilities, gives +(HD - 1) levels of abilities in the first flavor-matching class you take? Other than that it mostly cleaves ...

The lesson to be learned from 5e is that people wanted cleaner rules, nice things for fighting-people, and that min-max culture is bad for the hobby.

Thread necromancy is actively encouraged here rather than making a hundred new threads for a topic that keeps coming up, but even by that standard, 12 years and the public flouncing of Username17 is a new level. Given that it describes "levels in a X class" and not "levels of X featu...

I thought about whether pure market share had any effect, but there are so many popular IP games I either stopped playing or never played because the rules either made my eyes glaze over or they just seemed incomplete. Maybe it's also the approach? I mean, I don't know what a Wheel of Time RPG adven...

Hello all, Is DnD the most popular RPG just because it has the lowest barrier to entry? Rules-lite games are actually pretty hard to adjudicate. Crunchier games are harder to learn. Crunchy, rules-light games don't offer enough options. Is DnD the sweet spot of "I can hand you a character sheet...

I feel like the game is actually a massive improvement on the opening chapter. In the game, the Stag King is also a complete nightmare if you don't grind and sidequest, unless you let the owlbear loose and let it kill him. Overall, the game is a grindfest. The quests are a lot of "why do we ca...

You have to remember that FR and DL are oldschool settings where it would not be weird to stab the gods in the guts because they only have 86 HPs. At some point, weird born-again Christian guys took over DnD and gods went from Conan-style monsters to unkillable Christian-style gods and people starte...

Considering that Trump is not going to go quietly, I think the chance of a pardon is low. I think a lot of the "the past is the past" of presidential hand-offs relies on the gentleman's agreement that you don't be a bitch about it and fade off into the night and leave politics, and in retu...

Selling 'lifelike statues' is an old plot, one I've seen more than once. The best version I've seen was in the old Gazetteer for Darokin where the "artist" was using a rare cockatrice that turned people into jet statues. Semiprecious stone for the win. Personally, I've always been a fan o...

erik wrote:I too enjoyed the books and tried to reflect on K’s comments. I dunno. I thought characters developed over the books. Maybe especially developed between books. I’ll have to reread em at some point.

I finished the first book, but I didn't have any interest in more, so my opinion is based on that.

To make a film or tv show with a big budget, you need to convince the money guys that there is interest in your property. The above properties were successes in their original form, and so they were funded. The fact is that they were not good enough to be translated to film, and almost certainly we...

...Valerian or Ender's Game or John Carter or Jupiter Ascending... To be fair, those properties are stupid. They were never going to be successful. To make a film or tv show with a big budget, you need to convince the money guys that there is interest in your property. The above properties were suc...

It's also probably also worth mentioning that there are lots of players who just can't handle complexity. A "realistic" world just happens to involve a very simple and understandable system with few inputs and outputs.

Here is a good explanation on hard magic systems and is a pretty good general explanation about how realism vs magic works in fantasy fiction.

If the default levels of characters in 3.X DnD is to be believed, healing magic is not very common. Most small communities have access to maybe one person who can heal minor wounds, so there would be fewer deaths by infection, but only major cities would have access to anyone who can cast Cure Disea...

I bless...the atmosphere. That's one thing isn't it? And a fair bit of it is water. Bless water, which evaporates and enters the water cycle. Therefore, I suppose one could do that as a(n indirect) way to bless the rains down in Africa. Catholic holy water is pure water, ritual, and addition of ing...

I get what you're saying about fail forward, I just don't understand where it should or shouldn't force you to try another approach. The previous example had the lock-picking fail and the party had to resort to kicking the door in. Is fail-forward supposed to be saying "yes" to every sing...

“As a long time fan of Exalted, I’m thrilled to be working on a project that will help spread the joy of playing Exalted to all players — from newcomers to dedicated fans,” All I need is this piece of Mearls-speak to see this is going to be Exalted: Mearls Edition - The Search For Critical Role Mon...

This sort of sounds like PCs going from random table to random table, though. Maybe buttressed by an encounter with a statblock. I really enjoy random tables, but this sounds excessive. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. It should be auto-success if you have enough skill. I've lost too many Rogues in DnD ...

Imagine failing a roll to unlock a lock, but rather than just failing, you roll on a failed lockpicking chart and get the result "Pick breaks loudly, alerting anyone inside that the door was tampered with. They investigate." So the PCs lose the chance for surprise, but the game continues ...

I've recently come to the opinion that an RPG ruleset works best when its a randomizer of the narrative. So rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice is actively harmful. The people who want to roll Dodge dice to counter Attack dice and then have rerolls or exploding dice... I don't know what to te...

I've recently come to the opinion that an RPG ruleset works best when its a randomizer of the narrative. So rolling dice for the sake of rolling dice is actively harmful. The people who want to roll Dodge dice to counter Attack dice and then have rerolls or exploding dice... I don't know what to tel...

I honestly think that if you want the bad old days of the DM trying to kill you, Dungeon Crawl Classics-style is great. You just have to get used to the fact that stats are 3d6 with no choosing which number goes into which stat, the only character customization is the one time you choose a class, a...

I honestly think that if you want the bad old days of the DM trying to kill you, Dungeon Crawl Classics-style is great. You just have to get used to the fact that stats are 3d6 with no choosing which number goes into which stat, the only character customization is the one time you choose a class, an...