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There are two possible states here: The characters are either ready for combat (i.e. they're in initiative), or they're not. If they're trying to be ready for an attack, they should enter initiative (and you probably need to give them this option.) If they're not trying to be ready, then the...

d6. For sneak attacks, short swords, and *cough* counters to denote enemy locations.

So alien you can't even comprehend it is hard. Hard, doable, but tricky is "alien mindset that's almost, but not quite, like what you were accepting." In C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner books, the Atevi race is wired differently than humans as far as how social relationships work. It looks like...

Some other thoughts on how to make the wizard feel useful: 1) There are certain types of creatures that are especially upsetting to melee types because of DR or force effects. Throwing some of those at a party might be a good idea (although it's important to note that you should figure out if...

Warforged, in fact, take damage from rust monsters. They're also subject to rusting grasp, and effects that can hedge out wood or metal, and heat metal and chill metal both hurt them as if they were wearing armor. Luckily for them, warp wood and similar effects only work on objects. After...

Oh, and Veneficus: Note that warforged and that numerous. While a group of PCs composed entirely of warforged might be a *great* team for someone to hire to look into this nasty disease, chances are very slight that the disease is going to be no big deal because everybody living in the area is...

I think the 1/2 healing is a big issue, as well. Another fun thing is that if you take the Improved Fortification warforged feat (grants immunity to sneak attacks and extra damage from critical hits), you can no longer be healed by Healing spells any more. And let's look at some others...

Thinking about it, I might say that an assassin who worked *purely* for money might fit as a neutral character--especially if the money wasn't the key motivator. (There is of course the issue of "a tough job, takes more effort, more time, etc., should cost more", though.) That is to say...

Mmm. Makes me think of greek fire. The appropriate way to use a barrel of alchemist's fire would be via catapult or trebuchet--launch it into the enemy fortification. Try to get the barrel to break up in the air so you hit a nice large area.

Just about any combo can be really powerful. I was talking with a friend the other day (we're thinking of having a gestalt campaign) and even though about pure melee mixes. Any melee+monk gives you the wonderful saving throws and nice immunities. Spellcasters arguably benefit more here, since...

The first edition of JC was a softcover book which contained both background material on the setting and the Silhouette rules. There was also a companion rule book with advanced rules material (addictions, radiation rules, etc.) With the new edition, the core Silhouette rules are *only*...

Oh, and yes: the 2nd Edition Jovian Chronicles book has d20 stuff in it--but it's very very minimal. There are: 1) At the start of chapter four there are stat mods for Low Gravity and Zero Gravity types. (+2 Dex, -2 Con and +2 Dex, +2 Wis, -4 Con, respectively.) 2) Rules for d20 variants of...

I have yet to convince anybody to play Jovian Chronicles, but the system (and that setting in particular) has always seemed very attractive to me. At the most basic mechanics level, the system is based around "tests" against a threshold. When rolling dice in a test, you take whatever number of...

The retributive amulet must be in The Complete Divine, or something? The splatbooks (even in their new hardcover format) have always been a breeding ground for overpowered items and abilities--which is a good reason to treat anything in them as totally optional (assuming you've done something...

In a recent campaign, one of the other players was a half-orc monk named Gronk, a former slave of the Scarlet Brotherhood (and a rather different monk, as his skills were gained primarily from watching the brotherhood, with a little bit different attitude about how they might be used.) It was...

Ahh, but Harry the street bum who raises up to slay the tyrant *is* a heroic character. The point isn't characters who are from-the-get-go uber (although having one level in a PC class does put you a little ahead of the game), the point is that whatever the background, the characters are quite...

I've somewhat mixed feelings about Eberron, but I expect I'll pick it up, and as I'm trying right now to decide what setting to use for a game I'll be DMing, I may use it. On the one hand, I've been feeling like I want to play in a much more primitive world for a while--where people are really...

Best suggestion I can make is: Encourage in a group-wide sort of way that combat is taking too long and that people should plan what they intend to do ahead of time. Worst case, talk with him about it. Think a bit first about what he generally takes the most time with, and how that might be...

I actually started by writing a program to do the analysis in O'Caml using a monad and combinator based representation of the histograms. But after a while, it turned out that a naive approach was going to have serious memory issues, and I didn't want to spend the time to make things efficient...

Okay. I've just decided to do a very very thorough analysis, just because. The basics of it are: I have a stompy Postgres server lying around, and I figured "Hmm, I bet I can calculate the exact probabilities (within constraints of floating point accuracy) using that." So I have. First I'm...