Recent content by mattdm

Fast. A Hammerfest would be somewhat different. :)

This idea is cool in general, and the example you've given makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, a lot of the others seem to be along the lines of "Summoned creature moves towards the nearest creature within sight. In addition, a piano falls on your head." Okay, in fairness, the damage or penalty...

We ditched the character-based item-daily/milestone limit a long time ago. The house rule I use is:

I think someone has been reading the new Max Barry book: Machine Man | a real-time serial by Max Barry

From a Building the Most Awesome Optimized Character, it may not be worthwhile. The multiclass feats are nothing like a level dip in 3E. Since feats aren't generally a terribly big deal, it's not going to be a misstep to take it, but the main focus should be on is this where you want to go with...

I posed this same question about fiery bolt a few weeks ago, and the general consensus was that the secondary damage gets maxed out too. It kind of goes against my instincts, but then, hey, why not let the criticals be awesome. Not sure about the additional magic weapon damage.

A very good question, and another key part of the problem as I see it. The example of the campfire and the warhammer is not fictitious. The issue is exactly the same as wizard's "utility" powers in 3E — why would you choose to memorize them in the morning when you can have fireball? 4E...

So far they don't have the enchant item ritual, and I have indeed kept a close watch on magic items. When they do get that eventually, I'm pretty sure we can handle the "golf bag of staves" issue with "c'mon, that's not cool". This (and the rest of your comment which I've elided just for...

I'm about to make a house rule, and I wanted to make sure I'm not missing something important in the unmodified rules. Some of my players find the per-day (plus one more per milestone) use of magic item daily powers too much of an intrusion of game mechanics into game believably. I've given the...

So, I was able to pose the question to customer service and got a helpful reply: They're very clear and sure that the intention is, as we pretty much all assume, for the weapon mastery feats and similar to fill the same space as a class-specific multiclass feat. They also agree that the rules...

I've started to find it much easier to represent all of the differing non-minion combatants with very different minis. This makes it way easier for everyone, and is more important to us than "realism". (And actually, I think too much representationalism is bad for minis — it makes it too easy to...

It's bringing back prestige classes, basically. (Very small ones.) Presumably the idea is to a) make it cost a significant resource and b) put it into a "safer" design space where there's less chance of accidental super-power-combos. Any decent DM can deal with "b" in house rules; "a" is a...

Forked from: The Whip: experiences and advice? So, it seems that the intention here is that you can choose a single weapon-mastery feat in lieu of multiclassing. But that isn't what's written — the PH just says 1) you can't take a multiclass feat for your own class and 2) once you've taken a...

Here's how we do it: In the game world, light behaves just like real world light. It decreases smoothly as you move away from the light source — no silly lines. However, in combat, the light source is considered to be part of the abstraction, just like to-hit bonuses and AC defenses and hit...

So, in our last game, the infernal-pact warlock scored a crit with Fiery Bolt. The target took 22 points of damage — no question there. But, what about the adjacent creatures? My common sense says you can't crit without a roll for that specific creature. They players argued that the critical hit...