The Gaming Den

My point isn't that there's any game that gets skills totally right, but that if 3.5 skills are as broken as deanruel suggested then why play it? I don't mean to be befouling thread, just suggesting a viable alternative to playing a game that the OP seems to find extremely flawed. Alternatively, pla...

Alternatively, play a better game than 3.5.

How would you translate a technique that specifically counters an attack into something that could be used casually for non-combative purposes? It may be that some things don't acutally come with a non-combat use. In thise case, like the_taken said, it depends on how that counter ability works. Is ...

Depending on what a combat ability does, it seems easy enough to translate that into a non-combat function. Think of how it works not based on the mechancis but within the frame of the world. For example, an ability that boosts accuracy in combat could also boost accuracy in instances where it might...

It seems like this is something incumbent on the DMs and players than a flaw in the system. I would probably be uncomfortable in a game all about killing X Race because THEY'RE EVIIIL--but any decent DM knows that murder.death.kill is not a morally palatable game. Sure, some games have subdual-as-de...

Fair enough. I know there was some good stuff that came from it (Mutants and Masterminds!) Still, I think the main reason was brand management: Wizards doesn't want things like The Book of Erotic Fantasy and other horrible and/or creepy garbage being published as DnD compatible.

Because the average OGL product was of such high quality.

People said the same thing about the video gaming industry, but it turned out it wasn't as recession proof as economists had thought. This recission is considerably deeper than the previous ones we have to compare them too.

fectin wrote:Because 4E's alleged failure is a symptom of a shinking RPG market caused in part by a recession.

Fixed.

My group prefers to play original stuff.

But I'm not neccesarily against modules, I'm just currently not DMing our game, so what funds I can throw at entertainment are mostly going to novels and cheap vidja games from two years ago, these days.

I'd answer the question myself, but I've literally not read a single module of any edition ever. I'm sort of inclined to say that whatever the modules do, it doesn't really matter. The principles of game design stand or fall on their own merits whether or not the published adventures hold to them.

Well perhaps Swordslinger is, but there are entire forums where people generally prefer 4E, such as the Traditional Games Discussion at Something Awful. They generally don't dismiss 3E fans as trolls, but defending it will likely get you a snarky and flippant rebuttal. I've found it pretty difficult...

Oh my gosh, Wizards of the Coast putting out a product to make money! Those bastards!

DragonChild wrote:There are apparently no honest 4e fans.

The same reason Avatar is the highest grossing movie of all time.

I'll be honest, before I'd read up on the 'playtest' and the pointless rules changes and the even-bigger-than-3.x caster dominance, I was almost drawn in by the artwork.

the 4e system works well if you start with a difficulty and then create a terrain; it's really bad if you start by creating terrain and then want to ask how difficult it is. But the only reason to create the terrain and then assign some objective and consistent-between-campaigns difficulty for it i...

...And Paizo pretending to have a massive playtest yet only accepting positive feedback is somehow okay?

That depends on how difficult you plan for that room of the dungeon to be.

jadagul wrote:Swordslinger, here's my question. I'm a DM; I'm designing a dungeon. It has a ten-foot-long, six-inch-wide plank of wood over a chasm. What's the DC to cross it?

Whatever the heck you want it to be. I'm not Swordslinger but...

...Da phuck? O_o

You don't have to, but I've often found when GMing that everyone in the party expects their own unique abilities to come in to play.

I'm kind of torn, because from my experience the At-Will, Encounter, Daily structure works pretty well, but I can see a different sort of resource management working better. Many Dailies aren't really worth their once-per-day limit and some At-Will's like the fighter's Reaping Strike are unavoidably...

I think one way to handle uneven skill tests is offer different tests to different characters. For example you might have a nimble human Rogue balance across a narrow beam with an Acrobatics check, but let the Dwarven fighter swing across with their grappling hook and the Eladrin Warlock teleport ac...

He worded that confusingly, but his point is sound. MMO abilities recharge within, at most, an hour. Most do so within a minute. That's significantly different than DnD powers, which recharge, basically, at the behest of the DM. Sure, a player can say he wants to initaite an extended rest, but the D...