Recent content by cjais

Sorry if my initial post came across as thread-crapping. I'm aware that some people find this style of play exciting. What I prefer is more mundane, "realistic" traps. Traps that can be circumvented by the actual inhabitants of the dungeon, and traps meant to actually impede, kill or trap...

Do people really find these "tricks" exciting? I find most of these so metagamey and reliant on circumstantial knowledge of the player characters (and their spells), it becomes far more about the DM screwing the players over, than about the enemy trying to foil their attempts.

Here the problem is the ridiculously low, fixed DC of Aid Another, not Furious Smash. I really hope Aid Another is on top of the their to-do list of things to errata.

There's only one build at the moment, and that's the Charisma-based one. When Divine Power arrives that may change, but for now, you shouldn't even be seriously considering the Strength "build". It is fail.

The very fact that so many players lament the loss of a level 2 magic item, underscores why this errata was so badly needed.

I am really pleased with their nerfing of Veteran's Armor.

Are you saying we should actually open our books and look? :) To try and drag this back on topic, I think using action points to facilitate grand escapes is an excellent idea! Trying to solve the same dilemma, I gave a DIY elite a "move his speed when bloodied as a free action", as a "Get the...

And my educated guess is that WotC have started experimenting with Solo encounters since writing the DMG.

You know, I get that they wrote in the DMG that "Solos are specifically designed to appear as single opponents against a group of PCs of the same level". But notice the "of the same level" at the end. It provides the same level of challenge as five monsters. I'm not convinced yet, I must say -...

Given that the Kas (solo soldier) encounter suggestion in "Open Grave" features him along with 3-4 soldier bodyguards, I'll give an educated guess as to which side of this debate WotC falls on.

What do you mean by "can and can't see"? What has this got to do with using villains as solos, surrounded by lower level mooks?

Pshaw. All a "Solo" represents is 5 equal-leveled monsters. If the party needs a tougher challenge, or they are more than 5 party members, I can't see anything that prevents me from adding more monsters to the mix.

Seriously, it's a problem I actually recently considered, when designing a monster with a condition that ends on its next turn. Dwelling briefly on the hilarity of ruling like Bagpuss' DM did, I ended up ruling that the monster's initiative card stays in the stack until all such conditions have...

Yeah. Tell him he's the laughing stock of an online messageboard :)

Does your DM assume that the character who bestows a condition on a target, actively has to "switch it off"? That conditions that last until the end of someone's next turn doesn't measure duration, but the caster's willingness to turn it off, somehow?