The Gaming Den

The reason class abilities balance differently than points sysytems like shadowrun is because abilities synergize. If you aren't going to be making any attack rolls that give SA, SA is literally worthless, it's why various loops to get Wizard 3/PrC 17 that have basically full Rogue SA progression a...

PF design tenet: Core parts of your character's concept don't have to come in early, if they're things a Commoner couldn't do. Unchained Summoner, Elemental subtype: If you want an elemental buddy, it gets Whirlwind/Vortex at level *20* (and fuck you Earth, you *never* gain Earth Glide). Wildsoul (A...

Huh, so Pathfinder has come out and said that 1 feat = 1 level of spellcasting. Or 1 feat and a prereq, whatevs. This is the logical conclusion of the Pathfinder design philosophy. Or, you know, they realized that giving up casting for flavor features is bullshit but feats are a reasonable currency.

Human, Elf, Dwarf, Short guy, Orcish guy. Nobody gives a fuck about halv-elves. Then cat guy. Then vampire, construct, dragon and I guess demon-possessed guy.

The rules wiki needs the ability to handle the following requests: *This particular item is shit, don't ever show it to me again. *Don't ever show me anything rated less than 4 stars individually. *Don't ever show me anything from books rated less than 3 stars. *Don't ever show me anything from Mong...

It's a will negates spell that affects an attended object, it's like Shatter. It does the thing to your armor, and you get no saving throw against the damage, or it doesn't do the thing to your armor, because you made the will save that prevents the spell from affecting an attended object. I'm not ...

For the TTRPG rules, two things: 1. Everyone should reasonably be able to participate in every minigame. 2. VAH *must* be a reasonable lifestyle choice. 3. There must be plenty of between-sessions game (shopping, crawling the website for that perfect spell or sword technique your character wants). 4...

Note that "Trapfinding" is mostly "the ability to use Disable Device to disarm magical traps". When it comes to finding traps, even in a Core environment, the Druid beats the Rogue from level 1 to level whatever just by showing up.

echoVanguard wrote:'Gygaxian' and 'Jacksonian' seem sufficiently cromulent.

echo

We also have delicious potential for confusion, in that Gygax designed his games by throwing shit at the wall and keeping the nuggets that stuck, whereas Mr. Jackson famously has his shit together.

Speaking of Confederacy, slavery apologia is also A-OK on Paizo.com and calling it out gets you banned.

Big Purple is the Care Bears of forums: Fascist thought police, with manic grins, frantically singing happy songs. Frowning will be corrected.

Motherfucking Bargle.

You should split resource pools from the abilities that they power. That way, you can have illusionists that get more powerful as they take damage, berserkers that prepare Power Smash every day, and bards that gain inspiring songs by sneaking up on enemies. It's gonna be great.

It's a sad state of affairs when Sean K. Reynolds leaves an RPG and the quality worsens.

"A bunch of assembled house rules" is not an honest argument from an informed position at this point. There's a core rulebook which, sure, you can call it a bunch of house rules. But what is the 3.5 PHB, then? A bunch of houserules for 3.0? But the meat of the game is a cycle of supplement...

The benefit of huge dice pools is that you can have an even more expensive tactical smartscope give another +1 die without completely fucking the RNG, and that means you can print it in a book at the end of the development cycle and still sell it.

So, "a level 7 brute monster should have about X in attack bonus/damage, AC and HP." So far, that's the 4E paradigm. "It has good skills at +Y and mediocre skills at +Z. It has ability scores of X1-X6, modified for size and type (large is +4 Str, animal is Int 2, [Finesse] brutes swit...

Nobody rolls monster hps, so why bother pretending that they use dice?

Look, the right way to do monsters is clearly somewhere between the 2E/4E ALL STEVES paradigm and the 3E "like building characters, but ass-pull dissociated numbers to meet target numbers" worst-of-both-worlds fiddlyness.

PhoneLobster wrote:Don't go in from the start actually intending to design "Class Bloat, the RPG".

Well, it's still supposed to be a business, right?

Rolling 1d20+ [13, 13, 8 and 3] to hit for 1d8+20 each against DR 5 has to fucking go. Having recently played with kids, I'm growing increasingly fond of mechanics where you can just report what the fuck you rolled and have that be a relevant number. Also, having the difference between d12 and d4 be...

The Unchained Monk puts out the most melee damage at the very low levels, and gets short-range pounce at level 5, but he does it with a two-handed weapon.

I riffed an obvious joke on ISPs virgin insult; not condoning it, just having fun. I also implied that the world would be a better place if Mearls didn't actually pass on his genes. I like how the Den's brand of Big Purple Fuckery (this tone discussion) is "your insults against this specific na...

Regarding Mike Mearls' presumed lack of sexual exploits, perhaps you will find this little factoid illuminating: https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/492149290916392960 Not that it's a conversation we should be having. Eh, congratulations to the local mailman and the expecting mother (actual mothe...

I was banned from RPG.net (at this point I feel like MOST people have been permanently banned from there, from ZakS to Frank, because they're Big Purple Fascists) Perma-banned AND banned from opening new accounts, ditto paizo.com, both places for pointing out objectively shitty design by specific i...