The Gaming Den

Inventing a new boss to show up right after a curbstomp is a shitty MCing technique no different than fudging dice rolls. Ultimately, the goal of playing a game is to create an enjoyable experience. If the players are unsatified with an anticlimatic boss fight, then I don't really see a problem wit...

thieves had some specialty I forget, probably because it seldom came up. I don't have access to books right now, but probably breath weapon. Save vs breath weapon was a catch-all for reflexes in early editions, which led to it being used in all sorts of non-breath weapon situations. Save vs breath ...

I'm wondering if a system like this already exists. Hicks wrote up a dicepool-based Avatar RPG a few years ago. I never gave it more than a cursory glance, but the reception seemed generally positive. A few years before that, Frank had a thread with a bunch of musings about Avatar stuff as it would...

It seems like you're taking a very selective view of how things panned out in Tolkien's work, to characterize it that way. Indeed. Smaug's backstory involves him slaughtering an entire mountain of dwarves and burning an incidental human town in the process. He was only defeated by a luminary using ...

That's what the "mummified elf hands" is referring to - a Hand of the Mage. It is inexpensive and lets creatures open doors and stir pots and stuff. But to be honest lacking thumbs is only the tip of the iceberg when trying to integrate species with radically different sizes, sanitation re...

Survivor probably takes the cake for fast and easy entry, with minimum entry at 2nd level. It's also the only class in 3.5e (that I can recall) with a non-standard BAB progression, if that tickles your fancy. It's also basically useless, but hey. Off the top of my head, a PrC that was actually worth...

As long as she isn't doing anything to harm other people, more power to her. I'm curious how she makes ends meet though.

He probably means burrowing, which mimics the teleport bug. In XCOM 1, untriggered alien pods could teleport around the map. Back in EU they could even teleport right into the middle of your squad, which was especially troubling when it happened with melee enemies. Chryssalids are way more scary whe...

I got the impression he won the battles but the Council panicked. That was my impression as well, that this ending to X-COM EU/EW was now canon, which is what you get when too many nations withdraw from the project. 8: SHIVs are marginally more useful, instead of being complete deadweight. Hmm? I n...

Whaddaya mean, "wat"? The hacker/rigger who shows up for the run in an armored mechanical wheelchair is a classic powergaming move. It's also a classic of the genre. Snow Crash features a crippled guy in a "wheelchair" that is a heavily modified airport fire engine. He uses dron...

I'm not really a fan of wrestling, but I found Wrestling Isn't Wrestling to be very entertaining. It's Max Landis' rather... unique retelling of HHH's career. Worth watching.

Look Occluded Sun, if you want to simplify alignment down to Black and White Morality I can't stop you. I can point out that it is juvenille and ham-handed. I can point out that it leads to same-y, boring, cartoonish storylines. I can point out that it is a poor representation of moral good and evil...

I just got out of bed and checked the rules and apparently we played it wrong, since defusing an exploding cat lets you stack it in the deck as you please.... which certainly should up the deadliness, we were just putting it in discard pile to be reshuffled. You never reshuffle the discard pile int...

You're confusing Evil, which is a defined philosophical alignment, with evil, which is whatever any given person thinks is grossly undesirable and worthy of opposition. Demons are Evil by definition. And you are way, WAY over your head. Okay, so we're back to alignment just being hat colors? Becaus...

What you really want to do is determine what sort of challenges you expect players to face within each tier, and then create classes with abilities that overcome some subset of those challenges. Starting with the abilities and backing into challenges is the kind of mistake that made classes so inbal...

No, even for demons it is exactly the same case. What makes demons evil in your view? If you turned those same views back around, evaluating them from the position of a demon looking at humans, would they suddenly seem morally reprehensible? A philosophy based on the rights of an arbitrary group of ...

So the fact that orcs are creatures roughly as intelligent as humans, with emotions, culture, and a long history doesn't bother you at all? They're not people, so kill them all and take their stuff.

Truly you are the exemplar of Good.

Occasionally board games get some chatter, but it's rare compared to pen and paper roleplaying games. Is there something specific about them you wanted to ask or discuss?

I like it, especially the improved Trapfinding and the tradeoffs from Sneak Attack Modification. Very cool. EDIT: in case you can't tell, I don't have a lot of out of combat utility, so it mostly comes down to "hey, you have UMD, have at it" which is not ideal. Anyone have any particular o...

ishy wrote:So, I guess you can't drop your weapon or drop prone anymore while nauseated.

Or, you know, talk. I look forward to the moment some asshole PFS GM tells a player to shut up because they're nauseated and can't speak. Hurray for terrible rulings.

Depends on what it is for. For example, if that's the public key for the Google Play Store making it a constant is fine. Google won't be changing their private key used to sign apps unless there is a major security breach, and you don't want it to be easily modified on the device because then anybod...

Considering party set up, I think liberating should be said in quotation marks. Something like that. Jayden would have absolutely no sympathy for the Caelotions. They got their empire cracked, they probably didn't deserve the power in the first place. But if they want to spend their last riches scr...

I will admit, one of the details that niggled at me had to do with the whole assault on Starkiller Base. Send in a team to take out the shields, okay, but then the Resistance attacks this giant structure with fighters. Specifically X-wings, which are dogfighters. It's understandable in IV because th...

I'm a bit surprised that there hasn't been more pushback against the plot being two parts A New Hope, two parts The Empire Strikes Back, one part J.J. Abrams action, shake throughly. It's like poetry, it rhymes . I understand why they did it. If you want to be sure to recapture the feel of the origi...

Revenant gone. I actually have mildly more HP with a Con score, just lower off-stats.

Would you be fine with a minor magic item that gave Trapfinding?