The Gaming Den

[br]The guy who just failed his save to Finger of Death is unconcious and dying, but he should not die for at least a minute, and a simple Cure Light Woulds spell should not put him back into action. [br][br]Make "[Dying]" a status condition, like "Petrified". Then you won't get...

Short answer: no.[br][br]Longer answer: fvck no . Unless by "more dramatic" they mean "more stupidly random and aggravating".[br][br]Even with raise dead effects, everyone I know plays D&D as if it were a medieval game of Rainbow Six, where the ideal combat is not just one wh...

My objection to Pun-Pun is strictly on aesthetic grounds. It's just not very interesting .[br][br]See, the thing is, when you're posting about a character build that will never get to be played by anyone in the entire history of the universe, there are basically two ways to make it interesting to me...

There is a plot-devicey time travel item/spell in Dragonlance continuity. I don't know if it's been ported to 3.x yet, though.

--d.

1155166695[/unixtime]][br]dbb, if you read fantastical works (such as things like One Piece or X-Men) then you can see that the protagonists in these works have the ability to shatter diamonds with eye lasers or punch an entire ship in half. And turning these same powers on human beings doesn't hav...

the entire system and culture of D&D is working against them [br][br]That's a real problem right there, and it's not a small one. Under nearly all D&D settings, the bad guys outnumber the good guys; they often outpower the good guys; and they are usually largely comprised of things that are...

Having a large number of people running around the campaign world who can kill gods can be problematic, either via straining credulity vis-a-vis there not being any of them who care enough about a particular god to actually do so, or via the roster of the gods being such a revolving door that nobody...

Dark Sun had an interesting concept, where clerics -- well, templars -- got their spells from people who were essentially just really, really powerful mortals. Gods didn't enter into it. You could eventually get powerful enough to kill one of said really powerful mortals, and that was just part of t...

Yes, that's what I thought was the point, too. Random Casualty seems to think that Lago was demanding that it be "sufficient" as well.

--d.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible to create complex and intricate characters with a limited amount of data. For that to work, however, either the setting has to be very sparsely detailed (otherwise you'll end up colliding with the setting when you try to invent specific details for your char...

Not being Lago, I am handicapped by an inability to tell exactly what he meant. Two basic interpretations occur to me:[br][br]1> Players who want to create complex and intricate characters must always be able to do so on the basis of a single page describing the setting.[br][br]2> Players who want t...

While you rarely see gods dying in Greek myth, you very often see them come off second-best to mortals. In the Iliad you even see the god of war get smacked down by a mortal, enough so that he runs off to complain to Zeus about how they're getting too uppity.[br][br]Gods who can be defeated make for...

Actually, one of the iconic D&D adventures revolves around you and your friends foiling Lolth's plots in your neighborhood, tracking her down on her own home plane , and beating the living crap out of her. Seriously, this was the plot of some of the most common and famous modules in roleplaying ...

RC, remember that the original standard was this: [br][br] If a setting can't be explained enough that you can get started with playing the game in a page worth of text, it sucks. [br][br]If your complaint is that a single page is probably not enough to run a game of complex politics and in-depth ex...

Having too much information is a bad thing, but that's tautological. If it weren't "too much", it wouldn't be "bad".[br][br]Tenebrae's problems are threefold:[br][br]1> Information noone gives a crap about. There are seriously pages and pages of text that deal with parts of histo...

Desdan nailed it. Having a lot of information available is actually a good thing. It's having a lot of information that's disorganized and extremely badly structured that's a problem.[br][br]On a side note, Exalted: The Dragon-Blooded is one of my favorite RPG books E VAR, precisely because it has a...

The world's gods alone will take up a single page of text, if not more. [br][br]Nonsense. It might take that long if the setting has a truly ludicruous number of gods and wants to introduce all of them at once. But you know what? That's a failure of sufficient fractalness. Introducing six to ten of...

There are some cases where it's perfectly OK for a character to get kicked out of whatever group of mostly-like-minded folk he or she belongs to -- somewhat dependent on genre, but also on the players, and how metagame-minded they are.[br][br]For instance, if you're playing a game based on the old L...

Game worlds need to be sufficiently fractal.[br][br]If a setting can't be explained enough that you can get started with playing the game in a page worth of text, it sucks.[br][br]If a setting can't be explained in enough detail that you can still be playing in it and having fun with it ten years la...

Save-or-die spells (and abilities) are very well suited for a game where fights are supposed to be fast and easily resolved, and where keeping information on the state of a combatant is impractical -- such as a mass combat system, which D&D originally descended from. Indeed, at some typical tabl...

1152951671[/unixtime]][br]I guess, but seriously, any mage who stocks up on (and cast mosty) Save or Die spells usualy get killed by DM fiat before too long. At least, that's how I deal with game-breakers who deal with every character by uttering the words: "Make a Will save". Maybe it's ...

I really don't know why we have to have Undead and Constructs be immune to sneak attack or enchantment in the first place. Does anyone really think that merely being undead means you have no weak points? Haven't there been like hundreds of zombie movies where you can destroy them most effectively by...

No need for such complications. Just make all spells do hit point damage. If your "Stone to Flesh" spell reduces someone to zero hit points, he turns into a statue. Et cetera. This is essentially how Power Word Kill already works, except that if it doesn't take you to zero hit points it ha...

Josh, you are a gentleman and a scholar, and I'll say straight out that in making this argument I mean no offense to Exalted, either in setting or game mechanical terms (as I actually like the setting very much, and the mechanics ... I can live with. ;) ).[br][br]However! You are quite right that Ex...

It seems to me like the Fire Giant should certainly beat the Cleric , and probably either the Fighter or the Rogue.[br][br]The Cleric is (conceptually, here, not under actual current rules) not as good a fighter as the Fighter, and has all the healing and restoration and warding spells. Well, the Fi...