Recent content by Oni

A skill's usefulness is pretty much determined by A) how often the DM creates situations where it's useful B) how good the players are at convincing the DM that what they written on their character sheet is useful. Basically, you can't really balance skills, their use is greatly campaign and...

I vastly prefer what was done with skills in the playtest packet as opposed to the last couple of editions, I would be extremely disappointed to see that go away.

I'd buy that.

Well, it is a role-playing game, it's not unreasonable to ask the DM to role-play. And in the absence of an obvious answer there's always percentage dice that can make the determination Sometimes things don't work. Such is life. If it's obvious it won't work then the player probably deserves...

I said it ran fine, I didn't say there wasn't room for improvement. I'm on board for the vision that was presented to us, a core that runs old school that can be altered and modernized through optional rules. I want a flexible game and the more they try to bake into the base core classes the...

D&D ran fine back in the day without any of that extra junk, no reason it won't now, whether you need or want those extra rules is purely a matter of preference, and that's precisely why themes and backgrounds need to remain optional.

Besides aren't themes supposed to be this optional thing, why would you try to hide classes in them.

1) You said readied action, not reaction, those are different. 2) If the skill-use/maneuver/casting time is just a generally listed as on reaction, that doesn't imply combat. Only when you start narrowing the trigger to things, like "you're attack", instead of "something happens" do you start...

That's a hugely tactical part of the game. If someone correctly anticipates what their opponent will do, stakes their next action on it, and then successfully carries out their plan, that's smart. There should be consequences to being outwitted, if the person about to charge the wizard see...

This opens up all sorts of weirdness. You can heal sleep spells and charms. You can make people more susceptible to charming by punching them in the face. Should HP totals be hidden when you're essentially asking people to gamble their limited resources on trying to achieve a specific...

There are systems that handle magic in this fashion. Legends of Anglerre, for instance, basically handles going to 0 stress (HP) as losing narrative control. However there it is a lot more nuanced and there are degrees of effect and you can also lay down smaller status conditions as maneuvers...

You would have to change the magic system so much for this to work that it would cease to be D&D.

Sometimes the point is the fluff, not the mechanics.

I'd prefer to keep the decision points down, but that doesn't mean I think you should be able to do less stuff in a round. What I don't want is something like this: For my move action I vault over his head, then I use my minor action to draw a dagger, and then I use a standard action to...

Hmm, that would be a poor ruling for the reasons already pointed out.