Recent content by James Gasik

Ah, thank you!

There was a spell to recharge magic items in an issue of Dragon, my DM ported it into his 2e game. Sadly, I can't recall which issue it was in, and there's a lot of them. I miss Dragon magazine.

At the risk of further derailing the conversation, the 5e Feats are a step in a better direction, mostly. The weak passive bonus type Feats at least grant a stat improvement, and the good Feats have multiple abilities packaged together. Granted, you get less of them, but taking a Feat in 5e...

Ah, Feats. A wonderful bit of design. "Let's create special features that aren't tied to a character class, that you can use to customize your character." We'd seen some of this with a few NWP's like Blind Fighting, the Style Feats in Complete Fighter, and the crazy combat techniques found in...

The last time a character was reincarnated in a game I was running, I had a long chat with the player about their expectations and concerns. While in the old days, having your character transmogrified against your will was common, some people react badly to it, and when you consider that, for a...

AD&D xp charts are just mind-boggling. I remember the 2e DMG attempted to explain how they were derived, with it's class creation rules, but then immediately pointed out you cannot create the existing classes using them! The numbers seem completely arbitrary to me, and stray from their pattern...

When you consider that the difference between a 17 Dex and an 18 Dex feels like an entire level of ability for a Thief with regards to their Thieving skills, yeah, losing a few points of Dexterity is a big deal. And at 10, the penalties would make you feel like you've gone down 2-3 levels (on...

I think this looks pretty good, if I were to play an AD&D game again, this might make me consider a Wizard, and that's pretty good considering how miserable an experience playing AD&D Wizards was for me in the past. I assume that having done this, Illusionist is next for revision? If so, I'd...

So there was a discussion on the Tales of the Valiant Discord server today about Reincarnation that I felt was pretty relevant. For the most part, with the distinct separation of Lineage (what you are) and Heritage (how you grew up), and the disassociation of ability scores from either, ToV's...

The cat has both achieved and not achieved Nirvana, until it is observed.

Another victim of the algorithm pitching Dungeons & Discourse.

Of course all of that is unnecessary- the Pafhfinder core rules state your Favored Class is the class you start as at 1st level, and at each level, you can choose between 1 bonus HP or 1 bonus skill point. It's a nice feature to add alternate bonuses for various lineages, but it's not required.

I did, but in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have. First of all, it didn't reinforce that class x was "favored" in any way. If I'm a Dwarf, and my Favored Class is Fighter, because of a combination of "Dwarves are good Fighters" and "Dwarves have a proud military tradition", it should reward...

I've encountered DM's who would make gender variable, and other factors like handedness or exceptional hearing/sight (AD&D) mutable as well.

Then we could have Ultima back.