Recent content by Mustrum_Ridcully

One of the things I notice: Most measures against 15 minute adventuring days or 5 minute nova loops also affect more "reasonable" play. What do you know if the party really exhausted some resources and don't think they can risk more fights? Who gives the players a guarantee that the GM has...

You had an XP generator machine and destroyed it? Madness! :eek:

I think as a game, it might better for my taste, but it might not be better for a lot of other people for which spells as daily resource is such a core conceit of D&D, that they would accept it as a worthy successor or viable game without them. Maybe in hindsight it wouldn't have mattered...

I can make the encounter harder to challenge the party. But how do I deal with the Wizard throwing high level spells at the enemy, and the fighter just doing what he does every counter? He finally gets the one thing he's supposed to be good at, but often those fireballs or disintegrates or...

If you want players to switch weapons more, it might be a good idea to give weapons benefits against particular type of enemies. Some inspirasation: In D&D 3E, weapons dealt slashing, piercing or bludgeoning damage. This was mostly irrelevant except against a few enemies, but you could easily...

Yeah, sometimes I think all the uneven and possibly contradictory elements in D&D are the feature why it's succesful. Yes, we can have 20+ page debates on such aspects, but for all the parts we enjoyed and that clicked with us, we already joined the ride. We were "tricked" into having fun with...

Yes, if a 4E party has only one or two combats per day, it can handle much more powerful enemies or larger groups of enemies. The advantage 4E has is that everyone has dailies. So no class has an advantage or drawback when there are only one or two encounters, nor when there are 10. (And because...

The biggest problem to me is that they are a tool of limited usefulness. I don't send my players to monster-infested dungeons and wilderness all the time. If they are, say, in a city and investating some murder mystery or something, they aren't running into bandits or roving ogres every hour...

It introduced in the sense that it gave a name to something and the rules were built with the concept in mind. It predades 4E as an aspect that affected D&D games before, since it has some game reosurces that are limited by uses per day - spells, rage, or whatever. The less combats you have per...

I think there can be some debate if we can actually mentally fully cope with the idea of not needing to do anything at all to live. But... for now, the real issue is that you don't get paid enough for not working, usually, and the productivity gains are helping only the non-workers that own the...

I'd say it depends on how "winny" the win-buttons are. I enjoy having some sort of game resources that gives me an advantage, but auto-win can be boring. Ideally, the outcome of an important situation should always be a series of decisions, involving when to use valuable resources for the most...

It might be hard to narrow it down to individual mechanics, because there have been many games and many things tried. I think a "modern" or "contemporary" game often have a certain level of intentionality in how the game will be played a the table, typically with a goal to emulate a certain...

I was also thinking of Torg when I wrote my post. Torg also had the initiative deck with the drama and the standard scene side. The deck would be drawn to determine which side would act first and hand out bonuses or penalties, stuff like setbacks (suffer some stun damage or maybe an equipment...

I think the best approximation towards a solution I can come up with: If the narrative goal is that force points use happen if the tension is the highest, you need a way to gain force points by getting into the tension, or somehow track that tension and only allow spending the force points if...

The pessimist in me worries that maybe the audience cannot recognize the value because AI slop still can manipulate us very effectively emotionally with words. I guess the question is - at what point is the AI slop is so sloppy that even though it hits all the right key words to get us...