Search results

My initial thought on this is, for every tier an encounter power is lower than your max, it gets a digit of recharge, from 6 to 56 to 456 to 3456. So at level 3 your level 1 encounter power becomes recharge 6. Roll once per round. Recharge any one qualifying power. Dailies also get a digit...

I have detected a subtle flaw in your logic. It is possible to think of a situation that doesn't involve any need to forge documents. It is markedly less possible to think of a situation that involves no vertical surfaces. Or, put another way, the obstacle for forgery is "an NPC who...

Prone is just as much a defined condition as bloodied is. It applies more than a flag - it applies a set of modifiers and action restrictions - but it's just as much a defined condition. It, like bloodied, evokes an image, and if the image doesn't match up with what's going on the solution is...

Yes it is. I can't stress this enough, yes it is. When you're playing a game you have a set of expectations set up by the gameplay. If you push the jump button twice and your character goes 20 feet high, you expect to be able to jump 20-foot heights. So when the story puts a 6-foot fence in...

Because the DM isn't allowed to object to you doing things that contradict him, or for example taking SIX FREAKING MONTHS to make a single check in a skill challenge? I call shenanigans.

So you're "page faulting" and "writing to disk". A page fault isn't a bad thing. Invalid page faults are a real pain, but your computer pulls off tons of valid ones all the time whenever it has something in the swap file but not in physical memory. There's nothing wrong with it happening, it...

Actually, this is the exact antithesis of the wrought iron fence made of tigers, which is why I can't stand you using it in this way. The WIFMT shows up when a character who can jump 20 feet in the air is blocked by a fence 6 feet high, that only goes down after he's advanced the plot. Gameplay...

Well then, I'm sure you've come across Hume and Mill's writings on induction, and Kuhn's on the nature of the scientific process. What is science, but the search for a useful fiction? Both those words are important - 'useful' to have some standard of evaluating new ideas - 'fiction' so that...

Yeah, the problem with elegance is that it only works if everybody can see the wires. Anyway. "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" is a rather seminal work about the sociology of the Internet, and how cultures that have relied on face-to-face interaction for thousands of years are somehow moving...

"[T]he fundamental unit of time isn't a moment, it's a story, and the string that holds time together isn't the mere proximity of moments but our interest in the story." --David Weinberger in "Small Pieces Loosely Joined", p. 59, paraphrasing Martin Heidegger I believe the phrase is "checkmate".

So you use the same swing you'd use to knock a goblin flat to squash an ooze flat. The difference is that the ooze can still move around just fine (using its move action on shifting form) but it'll be easier to hit and harder for it to hit you until it squirps back up to its full height. I do...

A Type Of Game The first and thus far only game I'm running with 4E is being run using the mysterious "Internet", with a bunch of friends using GameTable for a battlemat, Skype for table talk, and IRC as a final place to pose actions and effects. The game runs weekly. A Goal For A Game The...

Somehow, I'm reminded of those psychological experiments that described doing laundry in as abstract a manner as possible. Okay, yes, step 1 is the social contract but most people just use the default value there, namely "Hey Homer, us rowdies are gonna go play D&D, you wanna come with?" This...

Best-case scenario: he's comfortable and you go through with characters already bashed together. Worst-case scenario: he says "sorry, guys, I can't work with this" and then you can use NINJA INFORMATION GATHERING (seemingly indistinguishable from normal conversation but ninjas are sneaky like...

Well, the Run action only buys you two more squares of movement in 4E, so moving an additional square? Yep, that's Run, not Walk. Uh, yeah. You can ready any action, and making a grab is a standard action, so you can ready a "grab the rope" action in response to the rope moving into grab...

Actually, page 42 is referenced pretty frequently by the DMG as well, especially in the sections on skill challenges and creating your own monsters. The reason I know what everybody means by "page 42" at all is because I go look at it way more than I do any of the other 220 pages. I'm not going...

Not exactly. In Paranoia you die even if you get the information you need, because it's above your security clearance.

The story is anything the DM says. Even if it's in combat! Combat takes place in the real world and not the mysterious combat dimension. The gameplay is the players rolling dice and stating intent. Even if it's out of combat! You're still working your skill and the associated modifiers. The...

So everybody's gear is equally crap, the combat system stays as-is to reflect it, all loot becomes effectively "art objects" and a really nice flint knife is mechanically and monetarily equivalent to a +3 dagger. And if your cavemen walk through a time portal to the "modern fantasy" age, they...

I'm specifically referring to combat resolution and critical hits. And actually some of the best times of my life were playing in a Rolemaster-engine MUD where the computer running the thing took care of combat resolution and critical hits. The human brain is a 2-Hz system with 3 bytes of...