Recent content by Celebrim

Suppose a balanced 1st level spell did 1d8 damage. Would the same spell be balanced at 1d8/character level? Well, this is doubly better than that spell, in that healing is more powerful in D&D than damage (unlike say MtG) and the spell is scalling by the level of a the target. So imagine a...

That's exactly what I expected. It becomes like fighting a vehicle or using targeting computers. It just ruins the game entirely. Presenting the undamaged torso is such a huge part of the game that if you take it away there isn't a lot left.

I think that's perfectly reasonable and would explain a otherwise conceptual problem in the game which is that if cure light wounds was only curing the physical and not also the spiritual/metaphysical/supernatural, then you would expect cure light wounds to scale with the character level (but...

The gist of the Dragon article was that killing the sickly child could be a moral act if you just decided that it was.

Oh dear. I did not read this article when I said I would. One moment. reads article Well, that was a waste of time. The article is eye rolling bad (Sorry, Paul) and so cringy I'm surprised it got published. But I at least I am now not a liar. I did read the article when I got the chance.

It makes a difference because a fighter's supernatural skill to slip blows is harder to squeeze into being every other resource in the game than generic "luck". Which, is probably a good thing. You'd not want hit points to be that fungible. You'd want more like, "I can spend 4 hit points to...

That's not exactly what he says. He instead says at higher levels hit points increases mostly not through greater durability but rather to other seemingly supernatural or metaphysical characteristics which will differ depending on the type of character - fighters get better at evading wounds...

I mean that in both the first and second adventure booklets the are interludes with absurdly difficult combats that show up with swarms and combat in water and so forth that a non-optimized party of four could not realistically expect to survive. You probably shouldn't speculate too much on...

I don't like removing the side hit locations, it makes the mech feel too much like a vehicle. But I am very much in favor of reducing damage from an ammo explosion, as the existing rules very much favored not fielding mechs that carried ammo because an ammo critical was just too big of a risk...

I never particularly liked the archetype nor did I particularly like the over the top power creep when the setting was first introduced. It didn't really see how it could play interestingly and the "Mad Max but Fantasy" vibe went together for me like chocolate and broccoli. I love both of...

Pirate Campaign #1: 1e AD&D + house rules heavily inspired by the classic Dragon article "High Seas" by Margaret Foy plus Battlesystem and a lot of other Dragon material. The rules proved to need playtesting but a few changes made them playable. A very influential campaign that inspired a lot...

The thing I learned from this thread was that originally Purple Worms were more wyrms than worms. That explains a lot, though I'm quite happy with the shai'hulud direction that they went in and just to have wingless dragons be a variant on the usual.

There is several ways you could go. Hawk/Dove is an example. Do you think that violence is a preferred approach to getting what you want, or do you think there are stronger and more preferred approaches to violence. That's kind of obvious at the level of say Neutral Good, where 'Dove' might...

A big part of the Fantasy aesthetic, and this applies to every genre, is being special in some regard. Not every player wants to win all the time and some genres expect the heroes to be grittier and more realistic, but that generally doesn't imply normal. Even the most gritty genre or the most...

They are an important part of my commitment to not overly rely on my judgement or plans but to allow the world I'm presenting to happen organically. That said, they are more interesting and important to me than in D&D than in most other systems. When we enter into a sandbox in any system...