The Gaming Den

Why is the new unstoppable army of the Galactic Republic smaller than the New York City police department? This point, at least, is explained pretty well: Lama Su tell Obi-Wan "You will be delighted to hear we are on schedule. Two hundred thousand units are ready, with another million well on ...

I think the main reasons is that there's a big flavor tussle in published material between the writers who actually understand polytheism and write D&D gods and religions from that perspective, and those who don't grok it at all and just write them like a collection of idealized pseudo-Christian...

From what I've seen a common position is "Casters manipulate the very fabric of reality. Of course they should be gods." I've literally never met anyone who thought that. I've seen random shitposters say that, and there was that one guy on the Wizards boards that I was mean to because I d...

Being gay seems like too much work. There's quite a few guys I'd plow until they cried like a bitch, but then I'd have to go to pride parades, and be an activist, and drink heavily, and all sorts of nonsense. The trick is finding a guy who'd be into a dom/sub relationship. Plow him all you want, th...

Let's see, a decade ago I was still in college. Back then I had a group of a dozen or so friends who I and one other experienced D&D player introduced to gaming, and we had two games every semester, one I ran, one run by a different DM each time, mostly 3.5 but with some d20 offshoots like SWSE ...

But the attempts by Gygax, McComb, and Greenwood to explain the Chaotic portion of the alignment of the fiercely hierarchical slave-holding Drow was absolute gibberish. I mean, it makes sense when you keep in mind that the "strict hierarchy" is nothing of the sort and the drow don't actua...

While we're at it: Deserts. They don't make any food. Is that because they have a Farm limit of 0 or because they have a Fertility of 0? Any area with a Fertility of less than 10 is functionally unfarmable, because you can't make a living farming it. I'd say Fertility 0 would be better. I can see i...

The game mechanical end of that is that while you can sometimes access things from the tiers above you, doing so is a plot hook or a quest reward rather than an entry in the equipment section. Under normal circumstances, killing a dozen bandits does not result in a royal character, pardons for all ...

We houseruled the facing rules a bit: instead of freely changing your facing as you moved, you could change it a certain amount per hex, kind of like the flying maneuverability rules; several feats gained additional benefits or restrictions based on facing; casters had Reflex DC penalties for casti...

I used it in my last campaign, a pseudohistorical one where the party wanted combat to be a bit more detailed and lethal. We houseruled the facing rules a bit: instead of freely changing your facing as you moved, you could change it a certain amount per hex, kind of like the flying maneuverability r...

I've either spent the last five or so years in a delusional fever dream or else I can confirm for you that this is not true. Now, it's definitely true that the average player does not want to actually rule a domain, they just want a fancy title like "Overlord of the Abyss" acknowledging t...

In a 3.x framework, how would you approach something like that? Make SoD/SoS base DC 5 (plus standard bonuses), regular attacks as normal and 'weak' attacks a 15? A common approach to that is giving all SoS spells a less-debilitating base effect and gating the normal effect behind a fail-by-X setup...

That is, whether you get Necromancers or Geomancers is a separate question to whether you have Elves or Dwarves. If you build a Tower of Bones, you can get Necromancers for your army. But you can build that tower in a Halfling shire if that's what you want to do. Or you could build one in a Bullywu...

I can normally see the reasoning for dividing things up into smaller and smaller pieces, but I'm really struggling with this proposal. How is 'Unity' different from 'Stability'? Those extremely sound like the same thing to me, and I can't tell how fractious Nobles would be a Unity problem or Stabil...

My intuition is that such things should be tied to development level somehow. That if your economy is large enough, minor disasters like fires and local floods and blights are simply relegated to background noise. If your law level is high enough, minor bandits and unruly drunken ogres and such are...

My major suggestion would be just to get rid of immediate actions and opportunity actions and just have actions that can be used as an attack of opportunity. 4E and 5E D&D didn't really gain anything tactically from having Shield being able to be cast right when a sword smashed you in the face....

Is there a good reason why you'd want to have characters speak an alignment language, a species language, "common" and then maybe a regional language? If by alignment language you mean a generic faction language, and the setting has defined "sides" that most people are on, then ...

You'd think that the default assumption would be some kind of "Noble Council" where the different player characters get one title that gives them a domain super power like they were players in Junta or Skeksis or something. You could have default class/councilor assignments like "Rog...

Still, +1 for theme and being what I was envisioning at least in framework, if requiring more reading (I have no idea what +4 prowess per level even means.) Prowess is part of the homebrew system that druid is part of; it was written when scaling feats a la Tome were all the rage, and prowess point...

The whole point of the class is to lead the player away from a character that can do more things, just as well if not better, in exchange for...what? Convenience? While the late-3e pseudo-4e-playtest books kind of had "make people like shittier wizards" as an overarching goal, I get the i...

I'm gonna stop you right there. The Spellcasting Services rules are pretty much totally incompatible with characters actually using their spell slots for mercenary purposes because the amounts of money are relatively speaking titanic. Our hypothetical wizard may get 660 gold for using a 6th level s...

D&D magic can do all sorts of wild shit that breaks most settings outside of... what, Eberron? It didn't really have to, but I can cut Gygax and Arneson some slack because pretty much everything they did was slapped together ad hoc. I can't say the same for the people who continue to put out sp...

YMMV on whether player-enabled casual genre violation is a good thing or not, but nonetheless it's still poor game design. I'd rather have a game where the magic system was built with the genre in mind rather than having to line-item veto genre-problematic spells. - Magic should FIT YOUR FUCKING SE...

I don't know where this sentiment comes from, but Fighter is universally the most played class across editions to my knowledge. At least in AD&D, part of that is probably due to fighter and thief being the classes you get to play if you don't roll stats high enough to qualify for a "real&q...

I had a similar mechanic in the last campaign I ran. It was focused around settlement-building and exploration, so the party had a bunch of different specialized NPCs for crafting, building structures, ocean navigation, training soldiers, and so forth and worked with them a lot during downtime, so i...