Search results

QFT. My favorite RBDM trick? I give something really nice to the PC(s). Then I smile.

My work here is done :]

How unchallenging are the things that your hero is attempting, if rolling lousy on hit points won't seriously hinder - if not render impossible - his chances of succeeding? I could give my PCs max on all hit dice and they'd still have a seriously hard time in my game. Now if your game is focused...

And I'd give the mount a serious circumstance penalty for trying to do it with a rider.

The problem, of course, is that the "sense of reality" differs from person to person and is also heavily mediated by the conventions of the particular form of entertainment (especially the conventions that particular individual is used to). It's not that you are turning off your brain and the...

Doesn't everybody?

Yes, I did. Thanks. Seems an appropriate non-Freudian slip here :)

You realize that I'm now going to have to haunt ENWorld and follow your posts until you announce which book the power's coming out in, so that I can buy it forthwith, don't you? Damn you to heck! That's essentially my position too.

:D You just made me laugh out loud! I've never looked at the dromites before, but now I want to. I'm guessing that this is another of those things which can sound like an issue on paper, but rarely comes up in play. Considering how small the distinction in length is between most encounters...

Personally, I think realism absolutely should be chucked out as worthless. Whereas I think verisimilitude is useful. Since this is a semantic point, I'm defining realism here as "fidelity to real life" and verisimilitude as "having internal consistency". The D&D world is so basically separated...

Beautiful :cool: I've always found this very amusing. One of the things ENWorld has shown me is that different people have completely different things which affect their sense of "realism", and that if you look hard enough, essentially all of them have completely unrealistic things which fail...

Aha! I stand corrected. Thanks.

See, it's all about the cat! BTW, Greylock, the mods have stated that OotS threads shouldn't have a link to the strip since Rich doesn't want that done.

I don't think it's really a dichotomy. After all, you've nailed the reason for wanting both of those things here: Right. Which is why people want more rounds. As you go up in levels, your character, whether a spellcaster or not (especially in 4e, thanks to the system of powers), has a lot more...

That's basically my take on things. I have no problem with a really exciting combat lasting an hour or more of real-time. But I'd like that to cover 5-10 rounds of game time, rather than being about 3-5 rounds, which is what it seems to be at higher levels (13+) in 3.5e for my group.

Thanks :o My story hour does provide a good practical example of my DMing philosophy, but I think the main bit of my DMing approach which is relevant to this thread is something I took from Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Don't go for the kill; go for the pain." I don't like PC death for multiple...

Just as a certain amount of randomness contributes to fun, a certain amount of non-randomness also contributes to the fun. After all, I presume in your campaigns the PCs start the same session at the same level. Having each player roll 1d20 to decide his PC's starting level would definitely add...

Thanks for the recap. Sounds like it went pretty well. Always a good move, IMNSHO. One of the great jobs of DMing for me is to give PCs a lot of rope and then watch as they argue about which sort of noose will be most effective, before putting their heads in :] Oooh! This is one area where I...

Eat your heart out - that's the new monthly campaign I started running a couple of months ago! The big advantage with the above is that it lets one run really episodic sessions (something I'm not used to, since I prefer regular and long, very well-knit campaigns) with whichever players can make...

What mach1.9pants (hmm, someone I never thought I would type that) said. That said, there are some similar maneuvers in Bo9S. For example, Emerald Razor from the Diamond Mind discipline allows one to make an attack as a touch attack, or Sapphire Nightmare Blade (also Diamond Mind) allows one to...