The Gaming Den

Your god-favor system already covers virtue. If you are too unvirtuous, you can’t go to their temenos. If you’re especially unvirtuous, some of them start hating you. If you’re extra virtuous, you get sacrifices at a discount. Some gods can favor some virtues, but it doesn’t have to be 1-for-1.

Are you really quibbling over the difference between "popular" and "successful"?

I have no idea how this book went to print in such an incomplete state. It reads like a first draft, with contradictory takes on the same subject next to each other, waiting to be reconciled when the authors next talk to each other, and unimplemented design document goals sitting there in plain sig...

WotG is Borgstromancy. Be warned. For NPCs using social skill on players, just make the rolls fairly early, and use that to inform how you present the NPC. You can even give different descriptions to different players, right at the same table. Either they'll roll with it and roleplay it out (most li...

If Alice didn't boost in-play AND in-hand, she almost not be worth playing. I shuffled a few into my otherwise pre-wonderland Dragon-neutral deck, and they're only barely better than the Gilgamesh and Goblin Princess they replaced. Dark Angel Olivia was much, much bigger boost, because it gave me 2-...

I finished running Horror on the Orient Express a couple months ago. I really got the sense that a lot of it was an excuse to write off European vacations on someone's taxes. That same principle may be at work in Russia too. Aside: Getting captured is sadly mandatory for way too many CoC adventures,...

Neutral is at least minimally viable now. I use it for missions for everything except Runecraft (when I want to win, anyway). I wouldn't call it good , but it is easy to play and fills every craft. The core of it looks like 3x Goblin, Hamsa, Sektor, Valkyrie's Spear, Khaiza, Strix, Goblin Princess, ...

I've noticed a weird pattern, and it seems to be repeatable: cashing in more tickets at the same time consistently produces rarer draws in each pack. I haven't played much, so my sample size is fairly small. But it's a big enough difference to be noticeable, and it seems to be reproducible going for...

Agreed on all points. Jade was just more fun than anything after it. The other big thing Fox did was take the Ratling sensei. I forget whether that made them all "Fox" personalities, or just generically part of your clan. Either way, it gave you a whole 'nother pool of cheap personalities....

Robo-Crane in Jade excepted because nothing could stop that regularly. At the end of Jade, RoboCrane wasn't even a real contender. Depending on your local meta, you had a rack-paper-scissors between Robo-Spirit, Fox, and Shadowlands (any big force deck, really). Spirit was like a fast version of Cr...

"I have a shitty design that is shitty, and I named it for you?" Clever.
Here, I'll do it too: the DSM Paragon of Balance: at level one, casts one first level spell. At level 2, casts any spell at will as a free action. THANK GOD FOR LEVELS AMIRITE!!!1!

Idiot.

Obscuring mist, silent image look most promising once you're into it. Before it starts, charm or true strike might work, if you can single out a leader.
Otherwise, maybe disguise self and pass bad orders?

Having a consistent number is more balanced than a variable number. See, I have a hard time accepting that as the claim, because it's facially incorrect. That theory says that Behilder Mage is a well-balanced class (regular, predictable progression). Not only that, but Beholder Mage is somehow more...

A) you've never had the crazily pure water that's postulating, because it's stupidly expensive (e.g. http://www.atcc.org/en/Products/Culture ... nformation)
B) what Eikre said.

Having a consistent number is more balanced than a variable number. See, I have a hard time accepting that as the claim, because it's facially incorrect. That theory says that Behilder Mage is a well-balanced class (regular, predictable progression). Not only that, but Beholder Mage is somehow more...

I thought this board was full of dumpster diving munchkin power gaming types. That's why I joined. There's got to be some way to make this work. You pretty much thought wrong. There are (other) folks here who have an encyclopedic knowledge of various systems and are inveterate tinkers, but that's m...

A skill based casting system is by definition less balanced to level than a level based casting system. I genuinely don't understand why this seems to be hard for you to grasp. Because your claim is not obviously true, and your support for it is incoherent. It's as though you've said that Grover Cl...

So, what is this looking at? Is it just "how do I army?" or is it optimizing some particular starting point?

A lot of the things that are terrible for PCs are actually pretty great en masse. Example: a single magic missile is...unimpressive. A thousand single magic missiles is a killer. Same for cure cantrips, etc.

But the entire argument is a non-sequitur if you don't assume the system is balanced to start with. "Any changes are either no real difference or make things unbalanced" is semantically null unless "making things unbalanced" is a change. So, if you're really arguing that, I conce...

Total spells available by level for a wizard, ignoring cantrips and intelligence: 1,2,3,5,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,32,34,36 Same, for a sorcerer: 3,4,5,9,10,14,16,20,22,26,28,32,34,38,40,44,46,50,52,54 Wizard is almost linear, if you ignore part of it, but sorcerer is not. Either way, th...

Frank's specific argument there is bad though - spellcasting already has a non-1:1 relation with levels. It doesn't even have a k:1 relation; it's on some sort of curve. So, transitioning spellcasting to skill is not pointless as argued, and setting it to "not levels" is the status quo.

There's reasonable rulings either way. I'd point out that a fly speed doesn't make you immune to an air elemental's slam attack, so movement modes don't by themselves make you immune to the medium they allow you to move through.

I don't think undead are a reasonable power source, since they're probably powered through draining the life energy out of the world. They are explicitly powered by energy from a specific other plane. More generally though, I can't account for your unstated house rules. Even if your statement were ...