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All the time. It's hard to go straight into battle when the BBEG has abducted you -- isolating you from the rest of the party -- and has you chained up in his lair. :p

One thing I can say is that I wouldn't accept a Warlord that didn't have some sort of incentive to put points into intelligence or charisma. If we had to use expertise dice, something like "Roll an expertise die. The ally gains a bonus to (something) equal to your charisma modifier + the...

Thanks for the answers. Can't give you XP, Jester, or else I would. Not sure when I'll ever need to use Supernal, but good to know that I'm entitled to speak it. ;)

Just a quick question. While I was discussing my character's Scholar theme with my DM, he said that the level 10 Scholar bonus that lets you speak all languages listed in the Rules Compendium and Player's Handbook still doesn't let you learn Supernal because of its special nature. I wasn't sure...

I was literally just about to post something about this at this very moment. :) Before I say anything else, let me say first that I never write reviews for anything, but my enthusiasm for this game is an all-time high. When I found out about the first Shadows of Esteren Kickstarter, I...

62. While walking through the wilderness, one of the members of the party is suddenly struck on the head by a turtle that has fallen from the sky after being held aloft in the talons of an eagle. The turtle is still alive, but it's shell has a cryptic message written on it.

There are a number of Far Realm-related traps with interesting effects, like the "Far Realm Anomaly" trap (from The Book of Vile Darkness), which causes a random mutation in the victim, such as tentacles bursting out from behind their eyes, causing permanent blindness until the victim can get...

This power has saved my butt on several occasions. It's not just good for Defenders, but for any character who wants a license to act with reckless disregard for their own safety. You have to be trained in endurance to take it, which is a pretty underwhelming skill in the first place, so why not...

I disagree. In fact, I think we should not only keep Athletics and Endurance, but add two additional skills: Athletics Lore Endurance Lore Having a high ranking in these two skills will make your character especially good at winning bets at pubs and other trivia challenges that require you to...

If psychics are going to be in the game, then giving all of those potential abilities to wizards steps on the psychics' toes. An especially egregious example of this is the 4e at-will power for Wizards, "Mage Hand," which lets you magically manipulate any object or pick up any small object...

I've noticed that, too. Whether it's psionics, specific classes, or whatever, people who aren't fond of a particular mechanic sometimes seem to think that they're making a magnanimous concession by saying, "Okay, it can be in the game, but only in an uninteresting, half-functional form." This...

I'm in favor of a system like slobster suggests. Psionics should have their own set of augmentable abilities, not cast normal spells.

I think it would be a shame to get rid of the different Warlord builds, which each rely on a different primary stat. All Warlords need strength (except maybe lazy warlords), but a Warlord can then focus on Int, Cha, or even Wis to determine how he leads, and this plays out really differently in...

I like it, and as a player I don't think I would mind. Now, my opinion might be different had I been a player in that campaign and thought to myself, "My character wouldn't just be sitting on his duff while that was going on!" All the same, I think some enforced downtime is a good idea to...

Could you run a "control" group composed of a party of non-optimized fighters? Maybe humans (since they're kind of the "default" race) without the Survivor specialty. As I said in the other thread, the fighter is supposed to be the best at one-on-one melee combat, so it makes sense that they...

Maybe this is acceptable. The Fighter is supposed to be the "best at fighting," so if it's just a heavily-optimized fighter fighting a bunch of encounters scaled down to be around a generic "average" level of difficulty for one person, then I think it makes sense that he will be dominating these...

If a player doesn't take the Toughness feat, then yes, apparently they prefer to take less punishment in order to be knocked down. :)

I mentioned in the first impressions thread that I think the descriptions are terrible in that they seem hastily thrown-together, like an afterthought. Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil in particular seem basically the same, and the description of "Lawfulness" as it stands focuses more on obedience...

I was pleasantly surprised to see the addition of opportunity attack rules. The alignment descriptions read like they were written in 5 seconds altogether, though. The descriptions for neutral evil and chaotic evil say essentially the same thing!

You could either craft a big dungeon or wilderness area like a series of smaller dungeons, meaning it would only differ from a Caves of Chaos type setting by scale; or you could just populate the large dungeon or wilderness area with monsters first without regard to making it balanced for the...