Recent content by PhiloPharynx

The trick for me is that it's a balance between originality and mental shorthand. On one hand, there's "This is vikingland." It gets across an unoriginal idea in two seconds. On the other extreme you have, "If you hail from Schyzyx, here's a 300-page dissertation on the history and culture of...

Part of this is related to the amount of customization that your game has. The expression of the rules changes the paradigm. For example, I play Pathfinder 2e and it is a whole different beast. Their classes give a base set of features, their subclasses offer a few more, but the bread and...

The official rules don't work for Eberron. This is an official world where many lower level items are off-the shelf. There's an artificer class and a house based on crafting magical wonders. You should be able to find many basic items for sale. In 3.5, the assumption was that NPC's of caster...

The last time I rolled in a D&Desque game, I was told I had to reduce some of my stats. I don't remember the method, but I had a low stat of 14. This was in front of the GM. My dice just went crazy that day. Doing so well and then being forced to reroll a couple was frustrating. As is...

One problem with that is that I haven't seen many games be able to "turn the magic dial" up and down without problems. If you build the game around magic, then you have to figure out how to replace the systems that magic accomplishes. Healing, condition removal, etc. If you build without...

As I said, I prefer a happy medium. I tend to have a lot of rules expertise, and I generally offer different options that fit with the other character's background and flavor. I don't present it as "you'd better take X or you're a dumbass" I tend to say, "X offers you Y, and it connects to...

I do find that a game generally goes smoother if most of the characters are close to the same level of optimization. If there's too much of a difference, then it gets hard to balance encounters. I think people should find some happy medium that everybody can enjoy.

I guess our groups are pretty odd. We've gone through a complete 30 level 4e game, another is currently at 20th level, and several 3.x games to 18-20th levels. Not to mention long campaigns in non-D&D systems. Yes, we have real-life commitments, but we make an effort to game regularly...

Can we get summaries of the changes? I'm having trouble finding the differences in the 4e player's guide.

I am playing in the campaign and trying to avoid spoilers. We just defeated Madness and rescued Dassen. I had the living blade and I now I find that as a paragon artifact it went back to a +2 weapon. What's up with a paragon artifact with a heroic item enhancement bonus? I can understand...