The Gaming Den

Paizo was happily making Dragon and Dungeon magazine, and asking politely to do a little more support for the wildly popular adventure paths therein. Then WotC said no more mags. Paizo was dead in the water, so they had to start making the "Pathfinder adventure paths" magazine out of noth...

Lay off the MMOs, there is no tanking in D&D. Get off the wrong train, because there is tanking in D&D. It's just not a low-hanging fruit for character creation. MMO's stole the role from D&D, not the other way around. Big heavy meat shields who take lots of damage, and are too dangerou...

You know, I had a brain fart and forgot that they increased the warrior's hit points, and thus the minions you face at 1st level. So yeah, at 1st level, you don't even have a shot at taking out an unwounded kobold with 1d4 damage.

So, for a different topic of pathfinder stuff and nonsense: in working on a sorcerer character of the sage bloodline (I just like intelligence as a casting stat much better than charisma, and the arcane bloodline is pretty much the best one as far as I can see), and I was trying to find ways to cov...

Though now I say that, 4e Fighters started out terrible, and ended up minutely less terrible, so maybe that doesn't work after all. Heh, can you tell Mike Mearls likes Rogues? Monte Cook likes Wizards? What we need is a head designer who actually likes Fighters! Actually, what we need is a head des...

At least the 3e FRCS had a whole bunch of adventure hooks in it for all sorts of levels. All I got out of Golarian was there's a hellmouth and silver dragons with epic paladins on their backs are all going extinct trying to keep it contained. Which is Elminster up to 11 and still no hooks in sight....

Paizo's silly official setting If by silly you mean AWESOME! Giant space robot scorpions shooting fucking laserz! Damn! The setting is the best thing about Pathfinder. And that would be one particular place in the setting. And that's only appealing to people who loved Expedition to the Barrier Peak...

*sticks head back in after a few years* The 'benefit' of pathfinder originally was not the backwards compatibility (that didn't work anyway because they changed too much), but it was a reason to toss out the dumpster diving books and simplify things again. But now there is the Paizo horde of supplem...

Well, I'd be shocked if the Hickman's could do a non-fake Appalachian accent, since they've apparently lived in Utah and Wisconsin most of their lives. I doubt they've ever been to Appalachia. Heck, even though I've been to Appalachia twice recently, I'd be hard pressed to do a good accent. I blame ...

edit: just curious but: how does a non-native English speaker write? What usually sets warning bells off for me is when people make grammatical "mistakes" that you don't usually see out of native English speakers and lack of understanding of idioms. Just a couple of examples culled from o...

Having read number-string's director's cut of their entry, I really hope this person isn't a professional writer (at least of English-language works). They write like a non-native English speaker.

It didn't work out in 3e because they consciously made design decisions that made wizards' squishiness matter less than in previous editions. In 2e, if a wizard took 1 point of damage during the casting of a spell, the spell was wasted. In 3e, the Concentration skill means that squishiness only come...

Yeah, Seven had a unique perspective and Jeri Ryan actually had some good acting skills too, if you actually paid attention to what she was saying instead of her boobs. Hey, some of us can multitask and pay attention to both. On topic: My theory about Tuvok is that his character failed because he w...

Did they have some special setting-specific stats, or are these the same ones from the Humanoid Handbook? The HH minotaur was insane . +2 to Str (and Con?) would let you completely bypass the whole percentile exceptional Str crap. This was nice because the step from a straight 18 to 19 was pretty h...

Yep. He said exactly that.

Well, you do have to give them credit for the sheer audaciousness of their bullshit. Then again, every edition of AD&D prior to 3e had a set of revised rules released as an optional supplement (Unearthed Arcana for 1e and the Player's Option books for 2e). However, they didn't stop printing the ...

hogarth: You do realize that Vic Wertz's logic is based partly on some factors unique to Paizo products. Specifically, they have their little subscription program, which allows them to know that they will sell a certain number of copies of any new product. Thus, they know that a certain number of co...

More to the point, they think saying nasty things about people they don't like is inherently funny, regardless of how clever the material is (or isn't).

It's the continuation of the standard right-wing BS from the guy who got it all started with some really horrible speculative math. Sadly, he's joining the chorus of conservatives insisting that the Bush tax cuts increased revenue and that spending increases (especially on social programs) must be o...

Smeelbo wrote:THACO was so glaringly stupid....

Really, THAC0 was worse than the arbitrary charts of previous editions?

Or more likely Hasbro is the revolving door. When a bunch of people left a couple years after 3e, it was mostly Hasbro's decision, IIRC.

Well, once it became obvious that they didn't run the numbers at all on original 4e and that nobody was playtesting the RAW, did anybody expect better? I mean, they've been firing a lot of the people responsible (though apprently not Mearls), but there's no indication that they've got competent peop...

It's probably a function of having dedicated gods of evil plus a fair number of people with the ability to detect evil. When posers are easily caught, it's hard to establish a corrupt, dishonest church of a supposedly "good" faith. Of course, that only goes for traditional D&D settings...

The existence of the 4rry demographic (and Twilight fans, and FATAL fans , and any number of other 'why-the-hell-do-these-people-exist' demographics) indicates that some people will still enjoy things that many others think are awful in a non-ironic sense. Wait, there are actual fans of FATAL? I've...

The thing is, I'm sure the part about not introducing new characters in the novels is a WotC innovation. After all, TSR apparently let Salvatore introduce not only Drizzt, but a four-person party of new characters to the Forgotten Realms. In this respect, there seems to have been more freedom in the...