Recent content by Imban

You're always going to get people who vote for the contrarian option. Especially if it's obviously so. 8% is clearly within the realm of "mostly people doing it for the lulz", rather than any actual evidence that more than 1% of respondents would actually want that.

Haddin got a boot to the head without ever joining my party and no one cared, least of all the game plot. Torrent being dead makes things a bit "interesting" since the villain of adventure #3 is related to her and, possibly worse, the party might not know anyone at all in Seaquen without her...

My group actually tends to actively recruit NPCs into the party, so we don't have quite as much hate of DMPCs, but if it's a problem, just make them worse than the PCs. You're the DM, so it shouldn't be terribly hard - especially since few of the allied NPCs in War of the Burning Sky are any...

At least in my game, while there had certainly been hints dropped that things were going on in the forbidden valley, I don't think there was anything except the innate curiosity of player characters that would have led them there after the large Ragesian attack, rather than back to the Monastery...

Yeah, I've been running gestalt games for my group forever, so Solei Palancis Dreadnoughts in my version of WotBS ended up being these guys, and also full casters. The players have still kicked two of them over so far as of the start of Chapter 7, though. :P

See, that would have just resulted in the Dreadnought running down the characters' throats and out the other end, and still involved making dispel checks until one succeeded. Which, to be fair, would have only been three instead of 14.

I'm on WotBS #7 now, so it's a bit late for this, but in #5 and elsewhere, I've noticed some NPCs were just... plain dumb. Caela in #5 is a good example. I can't figure out her motivation for trying to piss off the party so that they go to the forbidden valley and kill her - it just seems...

Now, I run 3e D&D and quite enjoy running it. But, sometimes you just end up doing something that's 100% totally a sales pitch for a different game, and I ran into one of those during the session I GMed on Friday: <Player> "I cast Dispel Magic on the Solei Palancis Dreadnought." <Me> "Um...

Some of the 4e designers have at least realized this and designed around it, if in one of the most boring ways possible - just making it so there are no skippable encounters in the entire module without active DM intervention. Other than that? Yeah, you'll be behind, technically. I find that's...

Eh, this is D&D. If you really wanted to make a country better-ruled than it is, you'd just overthrow it and rule it yourself using your vast personal power. This neatly sidesteps the problem of selecting a good leader, because "really wanting to make the world a better place" is a valid path to...

Almost always a GM. Adventure paths and big dungeons are some of the only adventures I've ever been tempted to run - the former because they mean I don't have to come up with the entire plot, the latter because I suck at dungeon design. Dropping individual adventures into my campaign has tended...

Yeah, this just reminds me that a lot of us have entirely different game worlds. By the narration that I tend to use, most of my players' characters can shrug off repeated greatsword blows to the neck - not because they're lucky or skilled, they're just that bad and thus they only got beaten up...

3e and earlier, you got two full-strength black puddings with half the HP. It's still not impossible, but you have to hit each one 5 times in order to kill it, and 31 times in total to defeat a single black pudding. And stupid targeting can leave you fighting up to 16 at once, but hopefully you...

Try killing a black pudding with a pointy stick and see how far that gets you. I also like your insinuation that a game that attempts to stay out of the realm of complete nonsense cannot be fun. Classy, that.

Shouldn't significantly change things. There are a few things in the rules that cause this to stop working, like vorpal weapons, but it shouldn't significantly change things unless they pick one of those up. I dunno, if I have a high level of knowledge about monsters that eat me, shouldn't I at...