Recent content by Elder-Basilisk

If I read the rules correctly, Pathfinder Society characters cannot use item creation feats, but you can still buy scrolls as long as she has a few prestige points in her faction. One of the tricks with clerics is that you have a lot of spells that are absolutely essential in a few situations...

As far as I can tell, nothing prevents you from taking both archer warlord and battlefrond leader features. If you did so, you would end up with no chainmail proficiency (but access to a feat that gives you scale proficiency +1 healing surge) and no light shield proficiency but heavy shield...

Great story. It'll be interesting to see how many other nations eventually go over to the aliens. Also, since this is x-com, my brother found an more modern open source x-com clone on the net: UFO: Alien Invasion. It cost me most of the sleep DunDraCon left me with, but it's pretty fun.

How long do you plan to make the "your DM sucks and can't do skill challenges right" excuse. It's been about two years now and the mechanical framework listed in the DMG and errata still does not work. The flaws are fundamental to the system and cannot be fixed. Here are the basic problems as I...

Things I don't think 4e does well. 1. Novice characters. A fourth edition character starts out clearly distinct from the common town guards (not necessarily better as a glance at the monster manual town guard will tell you), but distinct. The mechanics do not help you create a sense that...

Is there a way to get quicken spell-like ability in core pathfinder? I'm thinking that I'd like to eventually quicken my cleric's touch of law ability (either as an alternative to the standard quicken spell+divine favor for personal buffs or in order to continue using the power to buff my allies...

Things I like: Don't be afraid to include handouts/maps/etc that are not designed to be a part of a book. I find that this is very helpful for: A. Area map. As a DM, I should have one of these to refer to at every point of an adventure. It lets me know where the PCs are and where they are...

I think it's pretty simple: combat is one of the most complex activities that people can do and it involves everything that people make or use from rocks and sticks to science fiction ray guns and space fighters. Everything in the environment is potentially a weapon, cover, a strength, or a...

One of the problems with the lack of fluff in 4e monster products is that, while it does render monsters very easy to re-skin and use as something else, the new monsters don't generate ideas. (I'm pretty sure the lack of fluff is real, not just imagined--back in 3.x, I would borrow monster...

Cadfan is correct about what I was calculating and how I calculated it. I'm not sure whether the geometric progression showing the average number of rolls before it matters once is more appropriate to what I'm trying to communicate or not. It would require more advanced statistics :)

And that's the problem with excess granularity. If you are running your combat system with a d1000 and extra dice for sustain or whatever, you need for there to be a variety of outcomes between 900 and 1000, otherwise there's no point to using d1000 instead of d100 or d100 instead of d20. But...

Hmm, I'm of the opinion that the 4e skill system and everything remotely connected to it--especially skill challenges--is a steaming pile of garbage that needs to be shoved out the airlock as soon as possible. But putting that aside, I think you are misunderstanding my argument. It is not that...

A friend explained this concept to me as follows: let's say you're playing the Empire Strikes back and you're trying to escape from Hoth in the Millenium Falcon. You bust drop down the blaster turret from the bottom of the old rust bucket and start firing. You roll a really really good result...

When I ran the numbers for the revised careful attack with true arrow style, it beats twin strike in DPR across most of the spectrum of realistic hit percentages. (By the end of heroic, twin strike beats careful attack+true arrow style when you hit 70% of the time, but not less and I need to add...

Since the daily power is villain's menace and at least one of the AI routines had Distracting Spate-action point-villain's menace, I think it would be very interesting to see a run of this showing whether it is better to use villain's menace to set up distracting spate or distracting spate to...