The Gaming Den

The "When did you stop beating your wife?" question does not originate at The Gaming Den and is widely understood to be a classic example of a leading question outside the Den. I think it came from some (obviously) biased survey which wanted to come up with a shocking result for the number...

Dragon: The Looting

or

Adventurer: Teh Killin'

Was there any real question that they were going to ban you sooner or later? The mods are clearly in general offended by Frank.

I got the impression from this that they just wanted an excuse unrelated to the general topic you raised (embezzlement by Loren).

David is about the second commonest male name in english-speaking countries, and Hill isn't that unusual. The guy must spend ages each day trawling thru the results of his name search.

The good thing about a dog - if you do have the time - is that paying all that attention to them is good for you. Walking your dog for an hour a day most days can do wonders for your health if you're otherwise inclined to read a book or sit in front of the computer. At least, in places with a sane c...

Tome of Battle above means Races of War, right? Because there's no fighter or barbarian as such in 'Tome of Battle: the book of nine swords'. I'm not sure a rogue is up to par with a Races of War fighter without serious UMD abuse, and that's also on your class list. The Healer sucks, inflict wounds ...

So, to squeeze their new edition into 60 pages, they'll be cutting a lot of stuff. If most of the conditions go and combat becomes almost entirely HP damage grind, would that be enough to do it?

Gene interactions can be pretty complex. e.g. we can be fairly sure that Mendel faked at least some of his data, because even the simple genes he was tracking when he was breeding peas don't split quite as evenly as his data showed.

Dunno about cats - though I think I saw that cheetahs have ridiculously low genetic diversity in SciAm once - but it's easy enough to find articles about chimps genetic diversity online, and they are much more diverse than humans. Just google chimpanzee genetic diversity.

If you want to categorise spells and get some inspiration, I recommend Ars Magica. The 4th edition was available as a download for free at one time, don't know if it still is.

From memory it was often more like a one-hour work week or a one-day work week. Buffs which lasted a decent time were commoner, healing took longer.

Congrats. Interesting to see you rather than just a little imagined voice in my head!

My guess is that whatever feedback they were taking note of on the first few extra classes was poor compared to the other stuff released, so Wizards decided to commission more other stuff and less classes. That's the feedback that whoever was in charge was taking note of, not necessarily all feedback.

The first DL trilogy seemed great when I first read them, but they don't bear rereading. The best D&D books I've read were Rich Wulf's Eberron books (Voyage of the Mourning Dawn etc.), but those still weren't good enough to recommend to an occasional scifi reader like my mum. Even used only occa...

And then came computer games. Designers wanted to make swords and magic swords and slapping on a +1 was as easy as a few bits of code and making something unique was like rewriting your whole game engine, os they just followed the convention of handing out bonuses. I think your history's in error h...

Am I misreading this or did that article go 9 years between posting and the first comment? It must have been largely ignored when it was first posted, which sounds like a good thing. Yeah, masterminds know what they shouldn't, but they don't usually get to cheat. I'm amazed enough people take immuni...

In many ways I think the game would be proved if spells and abilities were written more like Cantrip and Silent Image in that 1 spell has many broad applications. I'd like to see a generic fire spell that can heat or be thrown for damage or something. Yeah, it's a shame that the games which have tr...

One I used once - little puffs of dust, as of the footprints of someone invisible running away. 'Flaws' in your illusions can be useful ...

FrankTrollman wrote: Shadowrun Shapeshifters have pointed ears, you lazy fucks!

I haven't seen the original writeup - what's the significance of this?

If all you're using it for is to determine which buffs stack and how many kinds of energy resistance there are, 4-5 should be plenty IMO.

In Sharn: City of Towers there's a list of creatures which might live there or be met somewhere there. It's long . If you set up your own fantasy world you can have whatever creature distribution you like. If you're using Eberron or FR the 'kitchen sink' distribution makes the situation lean to Fran...

you could also hand out a +1 attack and defense bonus at levels 3, 8, 13, 18, 23, and 28, dump all the enhancement bonuses from armor, weapons, and amulets, and make the entire issue [of PCs needing magic loot to remain viable] moot. I dare you to write up the same with regard to 3.5 within those s...

The discussion here could be better sometimes, but Frank comes up with some good shit. My 2c; no magic item should make you win at everything. Take the One Ring in LotR; it's great, it makes you invisible, but it doesn't work on everyone e.g. Nazguls. There's more drawbacks, but that's the relevant ...

I think the 4e ruleset's problems with noncombat situations will make it worse with modern/scifi settings.

From the people with conservative views I've talked to, they believe that stuff because it fits with what they think has always been true, supported by anecdotes which they trust more than science. Their leaders may be a different matter, but only a tiny percentage of conservative people are the Dic...