Recent content by kigmatzomat

So what level of slime-druid are you?

This feels like ye olde "session 0 discussion" where the GM says "the phb says X but in THIS setting it will be Y. Do you still want to play that character as written or do you want to make some changes?" No surprises or gotcha moments. I'm running Shadowrun on Mars, Player showed up with a...

Exactly. Movies have torches all over the place. No one runs out or the scenes would be dark. Scooby Doo has scenes with the characters in utter darkness, movies don't. I played d&d in the 80s. The books might have paid lip service to exploration, but adventures were heavy on violence and...

My understanding is every author is supposed to get $3k/work stolen. The story should reference the site to lookup the "certified stolen" works.

I appreciate you think tier2 is low levels. Most people think that's the second half of a campaign. The basic premise in d&d is that everything is some kind of challenge and leveling means you need bigger challenges. Goblins cease to be a challenge, then ogres, and even giants all are...

We did this once in 3e. All the PCs were NPC classes, villains got PC classes. Did it in Earthdawn with non-Adept PCs who relied on skills. They had Farmer & artisan-halfmagic, so they couldn't use any magic weapons or armor. Well, the farmers could bind fernweave armor because it was a...

3e made it easier because NPC classes and leveled monsters were baked into the core books. It was much easier to have a retinue level up and be close enough in power that they won't die in the first round of combat with tier2 mooks. It can still be done in 5e but you have to massage the...

Earthdawn. It is a mix of point buy and class system, where classes make abilities available and you need to get abilities up to specific ranks to advance the class to the next level. You can multi-class but it increases the point costs. It also balances casters vs martials with action...

And that settlement is about book piracy, where anthropic acquired books without paying for them. The authors reserved the right to file separate suits for things like Anthropic infringing copyrights in the materials they distribute, that would be similar to the WB lawsuit above.

Gonna be honest, I hate it by default. Of the five or six GMs who've tried it over the decades (I'm oooooold) all but one failed at what I considered vital: making what the players contributed actually be part of the world. Not everything of course, but if players describe a bunch of NPCs and...

I ran 3e from 1st to 22nd. Much easier than my 2e game that went into the 20s. PrC management was a thing. Someone wanted the Lloth-esque PrC in a Dragonlance-based setting. We talked about it and he went Dragon Disciple. I ran into power balance issues with martial vs casters. Came up...

I dislike bespoke powers because that conceit is that GMs will ge the balance right. Balance is hard for professional designers, why do we assume GMs can pull it off? Frameworks like classes should have some semblance of balance but a grab-bag of powers is easily unbalanced. If you don't...

Ah, this is a design approach issue. I do that opposite; I figure out the handful of spells I want them to use before I make the rest of the NPC. If I make a caster specifically for an encounter, I'm choosing spells for the encounter and the NPC is there as a "how/why". Again, class as...

How much time do you spend designing the "boss" encounter of your game arcs? Especially for a boss encounter where you want the boss to escape and show up later? I often spend more than an hour on that, regardless of game system. NPC design and encounter design are the same thing when the...

I run shadowrun right now and HARD YES. I would love a template system for making NPCs instead of every one being utterly bespoke. Classes are frameworks and when you learn to use it as a framework, it makes less work. Look, when making NPCs I follow 3 paths: 1) cool idea for a NPC who will...