Search results

I voted "No thanks." In theory I might enjoy a game with psi if the setting was right and the psionic rules were carefully crafted. In practice psionics is even worse than magic in terms of "everyone who is anyone must have psi powers, or at least must invest heavily in defenses vs psionics."...

Transcript? I prefer text over practically any podcast/talking head/audiobook.

The Fantasy Trip, or rather my homebrew based heavily on The Fantasy Trip, with fatigue-St costs for spells. One point I particularly like is that the St cost to cast a spell isn't rigidly fixed to the Intelligence-stat requirement to learn it. One point I particularly dislike in the stock TFT...

I'd say that I want magic to feel magical too - but my mileage significantly varies when it comes to what makes magic feel magical. Magic that's very common and even ubiquitous does feel magical to me. It gives me that "We're not in Kansas anymore!" sense of wonder. Rare magic doesn't; it...

3.5 is the only D&D edition I'll run any more. (I will run other, non-class&level games, however) It does have annoyances, but later editions have kept the parts I find annoying while dropping the parts I really like. In particular, I like 3.5e for having a skill system that was actually halfway...

A fourth point that pushed "christmas tree outfitting" was the inflated cost of more powerful items over weaker ones. For example +3 armor was 9000 gp, while +1 armor, +1 shield, and +1 amulet of Natural Armor came to only 4000 gp total. So that aspect of the system pushed for "lots of items"...

Thoughts: 1. Tracking ammo can add a touch of verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. 2. It's good to have matching levels of abstraction. If the combat system rolls for each arrow loosed at a monster, then tracking each arrow loosed is a good pairing - better than...

50% for all arrows is my house rule. 3.5e has all arrows that hit being destroyed, and half of those that miss being lost or destroyed. I don't remember what 2e did.

That's carbon fiber arrows. I've used - and reused - carbon fiber arrows back when I did archery, including bow hunting, and a check after each use is needed to ensure they're not cracked. I've discarded no-longer-good arrows, and while I have heard of arrows breaking or shattering when shot...

Yes. My house rule is that if the PCs loose a few arrows, each arrow has a 50% chance of being recoverable after the battle. If they loose many arrows, they recover half of them. It doesn't matter whether the arrow hits or misses. A special wrinkle that hasn't come into play yet is a house rule...

What magic should be able to do is a setting and world-building issue. In times past I've played around with campaign design sheets, mostly for Hero (4e) because it was a 'universal' system that needed to be tuned to the specific setting conception one wanted to run. Here's an essay of mine...

Very rarely. One noteworthy case was D&D: I bought 3.0 and 3.5 even though I wasn't finding time to play earlier editions. I was playing other games instead. 3.X brought me back to playing and GMing D&D. (And then 4e, and beyond lost me again.) But on those rare occasions where I do buy a new...

Me? Horror. I do not like the horror genre. I won't play horror RPGs. I have to say that it's a bit peculiar for someone to be OK with a genre in other media but not with that genre in the TTRPG media. One exception might be genres that are deeply unsuited to 'team' play, but even they could...

I generally prefer symmetry between PCs and NPCs/monsters, so players rolling both to hit the monster and rolling to keep from being hit by the monster is an interesting idea, but not for me as a GM. Now I seriously dislike "secret" rolls made by the GM for the player, so I'll try to eliminate...

I run 3.5e with a blanket ban on prestige classes. I see the PC classes as already being the top-level 'prestige' classes, not as 'starter' classes to qualify a PC for something better/cheesier. I like - strike that, I love feats and skills, and am wary about 'simplifications' that nerf them...

OK, why? If the party is able to trigger the trap from a safe distance, by mage hand or any other means, then they have solved the trap. Good for them. The only way I can see this as a bad or worthless or ineffective trap is if it's immediately obvious as to how it can be set off at a...

That would move the war out of the "intermediate" category and into what I called a "big" war - conquest in this case.

Coming in with a bit of thread necromancy, I'll note that wars can vary in how "big" they are. The Big Wars are wars of conquest or regime change (and can spiral into wars to expunge a culture or even exterminate a people). Other wars are over lesser causes than a complete change of management...

Which world? My medievaloid fantasy worlds mostly have some variant of feudalism, usually "cleaned up," plus tribal setups in the outlying 'primitive' areas and with other exotic outlying areas away from the centers of PC action having what in the 19th century was called "Oriental despotism."...

Confirming critical hits is something I consider... critical, as otherwise at the extreme every hit becomes a critical hit. But then I'm anti-critical-hit in general, and would either implement a "confirm" rule if the RAW didn't have one, or more likely just say No. Critical. Hits. As it is...