The Gaming Den

It got me wondering: are there writers or artists, anywhere in the EU whether Canon or Legends, that depicts both the New AND Old Republic as a failure in emancipatory politics? Not just the Empire era, which we can all agree is worse, but even when the universe was running on all cylinders that bo...

Same here. I would also like to make a version of Eberron that actually works. That actually lets you do the whole gritty/geopolitical/industrial fantasy WW1 thing with keen attention to world-building and a focus on awesome magitech stuff that you just can't get from Dragonlance or Forgotten Realm...

In the same vein, needing an entire how-to-guide for DMs just to start a session shouldn’t be exactly seen as a “feature”; and it’s very likely why the articles you link describe it as a “lost art”. If given a choice, I suspect most people would rather NOT have to invest the time and effort to lear...

Whether miscasts actually work as a balancing mechanism or not, don't forget to keep in mind the flavor of magic in the game in question when determining whether miscasts make sense. Warhammer Fantasy magicians miscasting in combat all the time, and 40K psykers doing the same, makes thematic sense b...

In my view, every class should have a different resource system. That's literally why OD&D was designed with classes, after all, to provide different play experiences based on different resource schedules. That doesn't mean you can't have multiple classes using the same general kind of resource ...

There are things about 5th edition that frustrate me, but it is not a strict downgrade from 3rd edition. It does a lot of things better, it does some things worse, and of course it has incommensurable differences in priorities from 3rd edition. I think it's pretty clear that if modern-day WOTC want...

I think the risk in formalizing, or increasingly formalizing, social 'combat', is that humans are incredibly social creatures, our social structure and social interaction is as about as complex as possible, any formalized rules will result in situations where people will want different inputs or ou...

1. Successfully hitting an opponent moves them back 1 square. If the attacker has remaining attacks, they can follow and hit again. You might want to make this only happen on a successful hit that exceeds the target's damage threshold. Partly because Star Wars weapons do not send people flying back...

How does this look for traveling by grappling hook rules? It looks good from a technical perspective, but from an ease-of-use and numbers perspective, I can see a few issues. 1) Having to make three rolls per sling is a real pain, especially if you can sling around in place of an attack so higher-l...

5. Everyone Has a Past: I have trouble figuring out what this tip is even trying to tell me. My best guess is 'a PCs Passion Attributes are sourced in past events, and NPCs connected to those past events exist and might show up.' But it's seriously incomprehensible. Where I've seen similar advice b...

The specific traits I'm thinking of are those that would be discerned from investigation; the tentative list being... Tracks (literal, collateral damage, droppings, etc) Time of Attack State of Victim's Corpse Rough Appearance (eyewitness accounts shouldn't/can't be detailed) Location of Attack In ...

That's sort of how I was leaning. As the rules stand in 3.X, using a grappling hook is just "Ranged attack against a static DC." That's easy enough and a "anyone can try " thing. The actual movement via a hooked line, I guess could be Climbing/Athletics/Whatever? I'm leery of ma...

A grappling hook in D&D is simple, it's just a ranged attack. But how should I handle actually traveling using a pair of grappling hooks? Should anyone be able to do it, or at least attempt it? Should it require some kind of training? Should that training be a feat, a skill, a background elemen...

But if we apply that to tabletop RPG design it can be a matter of the players knowing what quests they have to embark on to ressurect their buddy or de-stone someone, instead of leveling up the party cleric to do that every day. It can be a downtime thing too, like you cash in the good will you acc...

I'm not a native speaker, so I may assume more rigidity then is actually there. Can you show me one other instance in the english language where the word within is used as you describe - something that just starts within a certain time frame - without using the words "begins, starts" (or ...

Read on here that you can go from lvl 1 to 20 in the in-world time of less than a year. Drizzt is still slicing up orc mooks even after battling big demons and big liches, so maybe this wonky multiclassing can work if we acknowledge that 'level appropriate challenge' is not how the game is expected...

Yeah, you open up the book and get slapped on page 7 with this bizarre Fighter1/Rogue2/Cleric3/Wizard20/Archmage5/"Epic4" CR 45 monstrosity of a statblock. The FR sourcebook came out before the Epic Handbook / "D&D Jokebook" was released, so they mostly punt on the details o...

How many have you run through 5e? Because I run both regularly, including for new players, and this has been very much the opposite of my experience. Granted, some of the 3e games are actually PF1, which seemed to consider complexity to be a goal to be strived for, but even in 3.5 games it is far m...

I mean, this is pretty consistent with the basic philosophies of 3.5 vs. 5e: 3.5 has a lot of depth, but only if you and everyone else at the table have internalized a lot of the rules, whereas 5e is "Baby's First D&D" which only does 1 thing and attempts to walk you through that with...

(1) relying on function calls On the contrary, I'd say that relying heavily on function calls was the second greatest* innovation of the 3e monster system, for two reasons: information density and consistency. For the former, AD&D, 4e, and 5e all showed that you simply cannot achieve acceptable...

D&D views athletic movement and chopping through iron golems as something that's not tiring, all the tiring things are tied to one-off special rules like spell slots and rage exhaustion. Well, kinda. D&D didn't originally have rules for individual character stamina because it folded that st...

EDIT: In other words, you're right, people will smile and nod and accept that unimaginable things exist "over there" where they don't have to interact with them. I don't see how it's viable to present the intersection of alignment with moral philosophy as a problem "over there,"...

No, it literally isn't. Like Orion's "colorless green force" example, an objectively good force is a contradiction in terms. it's not just different from our world, it's impossible in any world (okay, standard cop-out for absolute statements: It's impossible in any world comprehensible to...

The true neutral perspective isn't that neutrality is superior to good though, it's that it is essential that balance exist for the universe to continue and therefore absolute devotion to good is actually advocating for a bad ending. This is built around the somewhat counter-intuitive idea that, si...

It's not actually possible for good and evil to be real forces that exist, any more than it's possible for gravity to be a value judgement. I mean, technically, it totally is, if the metaphysics support it. Evil can be a tangible thing that exists, has a mass measured in millNazis and an atomic wei...