Recent content by nightwyrm

5e PC party's tagline: City Adventures Only.

Not to get into a GNS derail, but how are people defining "simulationism"? It seems some of us are talking pass each other coz we defined terms differently. Simluationism used to mean genre emulation and just the running of an internally consistent world. Some uses it to mean simulating...

A class system is not a bad thing. It's a decent model for building PCs, but a party of PCs are a very small subset of the entire population of the gameworld. No matter how different individual PCs are, they're essentially people who go out and do dangerous things. It's not unreasonable for...

But this is exactly what makes no sense for me and violates my sense of versimilitude (since everybody loves that word so much :p). Blacksmithing ability (or underwater basketweaving ability for that matter) and combat ability should not be correlated. When I go talk to my head computer tech...

It is entirely calculable just by taking the die roll average. A goblin that uses d10s would have 2 hp more per HD than one using a d6. If you want a monster to have more/less hp, just give him more/less hp. Fiddling around with dice size for tougher/weaker monsters seems like adding variance...

If you can handwave a unique class for a single NPC sage, you can handwave it for any 3e/4e monster/NPC. Alice the Sage who can't fight a cat, she's in a unique "Alice the Sage" class. Bob the Sage who can beat up an ogre and do backflips on tightropes, he's in a unique "Bob the Sage" class...

Ah, I was using top-down/bottoms-up the same way MTG uses it, which is more of a flavour first vs. mechanics first approach to card design. I agree that the best designs combines elements of both but it's hard to do at times.

This thread really seems to be about the differing preference for top-down vs bottoms-up monster design.

Actually, it's quite different. Hitting 16 times in 4 round is much better than hitting 16 times over 16 rounds (assuming each hit deals the same damage). As in chemistry, concentration matters.

So I was reading through some old RPG books and to my surprise, Skill Challenges (X success before 3 fails) are essentially identical to TSR Alternity's complex skill checks.

I assume you're asking about duel implement casting? It doesn't require any specific items really. It just allows you to add the damage bonus from a second implement you're wielding when normally you can add just one. It works with any magical implement, you just have to be far enough along in...

Perhaps Tactician or Strategist might be a better name but I'm not too upset with Warlord.

Well that won't be vancian at all. You just turned all spells into encounter powers. People will be screaming bloody murder about how it's 4e. ;)

Already impossible since we know DDN will have vancian wizards.

I object to GNS's use of the word theory. Where are its rejectable predictions? What experiments can you do to test it? It's at best an unsubstantiated hypothesis - a "just-so" story that due to its poorly defined terms causes confusion and chaos on the interwebs. :p