Recent content by Moochava

Anything that turns "adventuring" from something you have to do because otherwise your village/your people/the world/the great dwarf-elf barbecue and friendship jamboree of '23 is doomed into something you do because you majored in philosophy and minored in dungeoneering and really, what else...

If crafting is such an important part of your game, skill challenges are the way to go: skill challenges are there to provide as much focus as possible on something that isn't combat. I like the nature/dungeoneering/streetwise divide. I'd also be tempted to rope heal in there for creating...

Imagining my favorite parts of The Silmarillion redone by Ewoks makes it clear why eladrins replaced the gnomes.

No, it's because "fight commoners with cats" isn't interesting enough to occupy my time. Maybe one day I'll have a sixteen-event cat-vs-commoner elimination tourney in one of my games and OH NO the verisimilitude will be destroyed because the cats do better than the commoners, but I doubt it...

But if the rules are that transparent everyone will know how unfair they are! ;)

And they probably got it right after generating, not paragraph after paragraph, but VOLUME AFTER VOLUME of variant rules, and then playtesting them. Though I'm not going to put forth the argument that we should blindly trust the WotC guys, they're pros with good track records, and figuring this...

The thing is, 4E's model might be lame in theory--when we argue about it here on the Internet--but 3E's model is lame in practice--what actually happens at the table when you get a trip-spammer. I don't care how many arguments I can generate on ENWorld or RPGnet or DarpaNet about how dumb it is...

I'm not quite sure how "I wish I could keep my characters in jail for a long time" is an indictment of 4E. I mean, I know we all have high-level DMPCs custom-built to save them, and that they all have magical talking animal companions and twin magical katana called "Midnight" and "Radiance" and...

Hit points reflect precisely nothing that is in any way realistic. Any attempt to rationalize them as "realistic" involves so much hand-waving it's easier to say "We do this because it's fun, so deal with it." If "hit points are believable" is one of the foundations of your objection to 4E...

Well obviously. But it doesn't work to the extent that it does in D&D, where you just can't kill some people with a knife-thrust, despite all real-world logic. Congratulations on spending a few paragraphs to rationalize it, but it's still the same sort of thing as per-encounter powers: an event...

You don't whittle away at someone's "chance to suddenly take a mortal blow"; nowhere does that happen. Yet you accept hit points without them violating your believability. "Heroic people don't spam maneuvers like they're playing a first-generation arcade fighting game" works pretty well...

Several martial artists here have already spoken to how they find the new rules more realistic than the old. Of course, Yes album covers are more relevant to D&D than realistic combat, so it's a moot point, but the "it's not realistic" canard isn't going to cut it. Rationalize it like you...

Depending on how hard-wired "flanking" rules are, I'm considering doing away with the grid and just using straight distances. I'm not sure, though: having to adjudicate "Yeah, I think 6" means you can reach that orc" is just one more judgment call for me as a DM--and I estimate that I can only...

"Dull" is everyone being allowed to trip all the time but it being mechanically inferior to a regular attack. "Dull" is a rule that causes specialists to trip with every single attack action they can make. Basically, "no meaningful options" is dull. Per-encounter powers are an attempt to get...

...That's a martial arts trip. What are you expecting, backflips and anima banners? They can do it as often as they want. They'll just fail unless they can activate their per-encounter power. In the same way that a hero can try to run his sword through is enemy's heart as often as he wants...