The Gaming Den

Thinking about it, the first step would be deciding what kind of time travel you want. Several kinds, off the top of my head: The Past is Another Country As seen in many movies - Back to the Future, for instance. While the past influences the future in a general way, changes don't multiply butterfly...

The "speed of time" concept is used in a SF series - Time Patrol, IIRC. Basically, time "updates" at a given rate - 1 year per second, for instance. So at 12:00pm, in the year 2000, Alex and Bob are standing in a cave, next to a time machine. Alex decides to go back 100 years and...

The problem is that if having magic items is not ultimately an advantage, there's no reason to go looting through deadly ruins to find them. Now maybe those kind of plots aren't a part of your personal campaign, but with some of the systems proposed they pretty much chop that option off at the roots...

http://www.animationarcade.com/animation/timefight.html This is the kind of stuff you're dealing with if you give out full short-range time travel. Great to watch, but that's because the animator figured out the convolutions beforehand. In play, I imagine a lot of replaying the same round would be ...

Koumei wrote:this suggests there is a save that can be passed

Passed, sure, but not necessarily passed easily. Even if the DC is nigh-infinite, 5% of people will still pass it, by rolling a natural 20. So assuming that a nuke kills at least 95% of the people, the DC could easily be "over 9,000".

Possibly it would be a standard action to lower it without voluntarily failing your saving throw? Although I have no idea why you'd want to do this.

Or yeah, more likely the text is just in contradiction with itself.

But choosing whether to advance an existing creature, apply a template to an existing creature, add class levels to an existing creature, or just make a new creature that looks similar is up to the DM anyway. Seriously, there are a lot of monsters that could pretty much be described as "<some m...

AC is an odd case in 3E though, because it doesn't really scale. By a fairly low level, you can have a massive AC, making you damn hard to hit by anything of your level. But after that, it goes up painfully slowly. So there actually can be a significant difference between 25 and 30 AC. That said, it...

For most monsters, it indeed doesn't matter exactly where the bonuses are coming from. Whether the monster had 10 BAB and +5 Strength or 5 BAB and +10 Strength, or 5 BAB, +5 Strength, and a +5 Insight bonus, the attack bonus is still +15, and all of those are equally possible for a monster to have. ...

You know, what with the Fighter and Rogue changes, and some of the other stuff, it almost seems like Pathfinder could be described as "Find a weak build for a class, make it stronger, make all the other builds weaker". Except possibly Wizards - they're still going strong, and the Evoker ce...

Well, 3E power attack sort of scaled by how many feats you spent on it - things like Leap Attack, Combat Brute, and Shock Trooper could make it several times more effective. Aside from that, it depends on the rest of the system - 3E Power Attack works well in 3E, where because buffs/debuffs/circumst...

I don't think buffs are unsalvageable - difficult to balance, sure, but not impossible. Especially not in a game with pure-Vancian casting, where a spell slot is a legitimate cost separate from any action cost. As for using feet, is your objection that they are a non-abstract combat distance mechani...

JaronK is saying that because Alter Self can be interpreted to grant you the "spellcasting" ability of a Sorcerer with more levels than you have hit dice through assuming the shape of a Sylph that classes who have Alter Self are vastly more powerful than other characters. Wow. That's a .....

Ok, maybe I'm jumping aboard the failship right now, but ... ... what the hell, ubernoob? Alter Self is broken at any level? Stronger than Wildshape, more broken than Planar Binding, shatters the game more than Genesis? In my universe's version of D&D, the best thing that Alter Self can get you ...

Why wouldn't you bring a gun anyway? People will still have bats/knives/whatever around their homes, and bringing superior firepower is generally preferable to bringing equivalent firepower. Hell, in D&D terms, would you leave your magical weapons and wands of fireball at home because the kobold...

Generally, where guns are more common in homes... Armed robbery is more common than in areas where it's not. That was Frank's point. Well that's not a particularly useful statistic, because it doesn't tell us which is the cause and which the effect. For instance, I could accurately say that people ...

Blah blah blah, your continued insistence on talking about weird hypothetical examples means precisely dick. It's a bad argument, and it insults the intelligence of your readers to continue making it. What? RC was pointing out that the robber having omniscient knowledge was unlikely, not the revers...

Someone breaks into a house. You're allowed to own a firearm. Therefore, chances are that the person inside does own a firearm. Solution: they also take one in. If they get caught in the act, they shoot immediately, as opposed to doing a runner (because when the other guy has a gun, you don't take ...

There is a difference though, in how much strategy/tactics you personally get to do. For instance, if Chrono Trigger was multiplayer, and each person controlled one character, I think it'd they'd get borely quickly. Likewise, Chess is interesting - controlling one pawn in Chess is a lot less interes...

To be fair, I wouldn't call that particular example ridiculous. If the some party members have good disguise and social skills, or spells to the same effect - and others don't - then guess who're going to be the important ones in infiltrating that city? If anything, it can be quite hard to justify w...

The drawback to the no-multiclassing, primarily unique powers design is that you need a hell of a lot more classes, and a hell of a lot more powers for those classes. For instance, let's say you have six classes. If you allow even just dual-classing, you end up with 21 possible combinations. So that...

but they don't give turn advantage to people lying in ambush However, why shouldn't they? Maybe scry-and-die is bad for the game, but the concept of an ambush - as something that has a real purpose - is, at least IMO, something the game should support. For instance, the PCs scout ahead and find tha...

Synergy is a good thing, most of the time. It's more interesting to decide something like "I'm going to make a burning oil area between me and the enemy, then hit them with a hex to reduce their speed, then snipe them as they slowly cross it", than something like "I'm going to use a b...

Which means that the "Class" is in there not to determine whether and when you swing a sword vs. heal your allies - but instead what it looks like when you use your ultimate sword slash. I guess the next question then, is whether the classes have any mechanical difference? For instance, i...

I'm of mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, having an established level range for the setting gives you a more consistent world, as well as a feeling of achievement once you reach the upper eschelons of that world. Not to mention, the russian-doll method can feel like running in place. On the ot...