The Gaming Den

Frank's repudiation of the culture he helped create would be a lot more convincing if he weren't doubling down on basically the exact same petty bullying tactics while he did so. What can be neither salvaged nor rebuilt from scratch is his cult of personality.

No amount of rules text will ever be able to reach out of the book and slap someone who's determined to be a bad GM, but good rules can still benefit someone who's trying to be a good GM but has no idea what they're doing.

D&D already has a baseline. Unless you're playing exclusively with brand new players, like, "haven't even seen much of Critical Role" levels of brand new players, they'll have an idea for how D&D campaigns are supposed to start, with goblins kidnapping townsfolk and orcs raiding ca...

Anyone can pick up any edition of D&D at 1st level, especially when playing under a DM who already knows the system, which is the case 90+% of the time. Are you suggesting that 5e's explosive growth over 4e and PF1 came because it was converting DMs from 3.X ? That Critical Role's big boon to t...

Monsters in general have far too few skills in 5e. I'm guessing it's because the designers never considered their use as anything other than a sack of hit points to wail on in the most straightforward possible way. They didn't even use elemental resistances or vulnerabilities very frequently, which,...

The difference in complexity between 3e and 5e is vastly overstated. I mean, yeah, you could bitch about the exact semantics of "the complexity is vastly overstated" vs. "3.5 isn't more complex," but while I can imagine a discussion where that would be a relevant distinction, th...

If you are DMing and you use 3.5 rules to backfill where 5e doesnt have rules then yes I question the mastery of 5e displayed by players you DM for. You think that players getting more easily to grips with 5e and a few bits of 3.5e tossed in haphazardly than with 3.5e in its entirety is evidence th...

That's an odd take when you self admittedly don't know when you are using 3e rules and when you are using 5e rules when DMing. Yes, clearly players who are learning 5e as their first edition of D&D are going to have problems remembering which edition certain rules are sourced from. That is a pr...

The difference in complexity between 3e and 5e is vastly overstated. I've run multiple parties of total newbies through a few sessions of 3e and they go from "What the heck is a d20?" to "Yay druids, I'm a bear riding a bear summoning bears" quite quickly. How many have you run ...

I've wrung 3e-style wyvern fights out of 5e with exactly two modifications: #1: You know that ability some 5e monsters have where they automatically grapple creatures when they hit with a certain natural attack? Give that to the wyvern's claws. #2: Loosely eyeball in the 3.5e maneuverability rules. ...

Oh, shit. Expect the great transcriptening in a couple of days when there's room for it in the update schedule. Like, these things are scripted, I literally just have to copy/paste, I just didn't think to do that until you brought it up.

I'm not particularly interested in bringing in new people as opposed to retaining the more productive people we still have, especially if the new people walk in with "5e is basically fine as is, why do you hate fun?" Or indeed the 4rry 4venger "raids" we used to get, if anybody ...

3) Being kind of irrelevant. Talking about SR4 and 3.5 hacks is not where the dominant RPG conversation is today. A "How to Make 5e Playable" thread / series could help a lot. I think all three of your points are important, but this one is the most important. This forum rarely cares for o...

I was holding off on posting this because the forum was originally going into lockdown, but I guess we're actually keeping the forum in general open? So I'm running a Kickstarter for Dark Lord, a tabletop roleplaying game where you are the Big Bad Evil Guy, which basically grew out of troupe-style p...

You wouldn't want the glitter tits in an actual MtG card because it doesn't have an urn in it and is therefore not an artistic nude. That would not be very well received by audiences in general and the MtG suits would be justified in saying "we're not going to print it because the people we pri...

I think making a strong claim like 'objectice morality' doesn't exist is difficult and requires a very high bar of evidence -- like thousands of years of human society living in such a society. I'd ask you if you think the world is flat, given that people lived in societies that believed it was for...

Likewise, Dante's Divine Comedy will be consigned to the forges as a heretical text, for no one could imagine such a thing. Jesus fuck why is this so difficult for you to wrap your head around? The Divine Comedy does not depict objective morality, it depicts an arbitrarily powerful entity enforcing...

I don't subscribe to subjective morality. Then you are objectively wrong about the universe. Your notion of justice is a chemical impulse in your brain. It can alter reality only insofar as it can cause your physical body to take action in accordance with it. The belief on its own never amounts to ...

I mean, technically, it totally is, 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 impos...

morality is really not complicated in D&D. good and evil are real forces that exist, not just value judgements based on societal standards. 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. People fool the...

My impression of Risk personally was always that it was a really boring game that's only made any fun at all by playing it with people you like, and I don't seem to be alone in that opinion. Risk Legacy fixed Risk without touching the core resolution mechanic at all. Risk's problems were almost ent...

In 1947, American WW2 general SLA Marshall published a book called Men Against Fire, the first investigation into how many soldiers were actually trying to kill the enemy in combat. SLA Marshall's conclusion is that 75% of soldiers in combat situations did not shoot to kill. According to SLA Marshal...

The paladin's smites operate off of spell slots, not specifically paladin spell slots Starting at 2nd level, when you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, you can expend one paladin spell slot to deal radiant damage to the target, in addition to the weapon’s damage. The extra damage is 2d8 fo...

Smite-heavy paladins are probably the strongest single-class concept you can get in 5e without getting into blatant cheese builds like the bone lord or glyph wizard. The paladin's smites operate off of spell slots, not specifically paladin spell slots, so you can go Paladin 2/Sorcerer 18 to pick up ...

My dream scenario has long been to essentially do troupe play Shadowrun in which the group grabs a bunch of dossiers for each run Mission Impossible style but alas people get attached. It's a good problem to have, I suppose. People are going to get attached to something , but if you gave them some ...