Search results

I think this is a great argument for adding "social favored terrain" to Backgrounds. Essentially you're saying that a good DM already gives this kind of bonus. That's exactly the type of sign that suggests the bonus should be baked into the system. The DM guide isn't for good DMs. It's for...

We saw five background in the May playtest, and presumably we’ll see more soon. I think the skills work fine. I mean, backgrounds don’t add a lot to skills (other than some narrative coherence and faster character generation), but skills are known technology. Yes, WotC can improve on 3.x and...

And how... I feel like they've explained the adventuring day five times already. Ok, I get it. What I'd like to hear is how it can be adjusted to handle different assumptions about adventure design. For example, what if I want a day with a single challenging combat that doesn't take more...

I'm in complete agreement. I'm even in ALL CAPS AGREEMENT. I should note, however, that mass combat is a little tricky, because it's actually three different things. In order of scale (not importance): 1) Adding "units" to standard D&D combat. If 9th level PCs go into combat with 20 allies...

I have had mixed opinions on D&D cosmology for some time. On the one hand, there has been some very cool design work in the D&D cosmology (e.g. Planescape and some of the 4e work). But on the other hand, I think designers have fundamentally misunderstood (or at least mis-presented) the role of...

The orcs description is reasonably good, but it is a mistake to omit the orc horde. I'm not sure why orc hordes are so much more common than hobgoblin hordes (although I'm tempted to blame Tolkein). But when you have tens of thousands of humanoid monsters, they are usually orcs. I think any...

Obviously (and most importantly), we're trading damage for maneuvers instead of hit chance. This is obviously key to making maneuvers fun just because missing feels like losing a turn and many players won't increase the chances of feeling totally ineffective. But there are also two ways in...

There are lots of ways to get this effect, but - as a general matter - I think the key is to make it difficult to teleport into the middle of an adventure. IMG, we handle this by making teleportation wards relatively easy. They aren't impenetrable, but a heroic level ward will keep out most...

This is an interesting idea. That said, I hope fighter's don't lose the Fighter's Surge ability (or something similar). I don't want fighters to have a complicated or involved daily power, but I do like the idea that fighters have some ability to "pull out all the stops" on a difficult...

Guessing how the DM imagines the world to work is, indeed, a stupid game. However, using the DM's descriptions to figure out how to do something creative in the world is pretty awesome. And those two games use pretty much the same set of mechanics... -KS

I had a lot of fun with 4e combat, but I certainly saw more than a fair share of static doorway fights in 4e as well. In my experience, an excess of static doorway fights is usually a symptom of a poorly thought out dungeon. If all the monsters are in rooms with doorways and monsters...

I don't know what to say. First, it's a tool, not a rule. It's a tool that helps DMs create balanced encounters or estimate the difficulty of encounters they built some other way. It's not a rule saying that you have to create balanced encounters or you are DMing wrong. Second, a huge...

Well, this is really about the question of whether characters should be directed towards single types of damage. If your character concept is a total poison master and immunity to poison is a major part of the game, then the game has to decide whether they are going to live with that "flaw" as...

Immunities should be a part of high level play, but they should be limited to "change of pace" opponents where the immunity is an unusual characteristics of that type of enemy. They shouldn't be a standard part of most high level opponents. The faerie prince is a good example of a unique...

This is a reasonable desire, but it doesn't have very much to do with the xp budget. The xp budget is a method of estimating what type of battles the PCs can win. If you want to set up encounters that your PCs are supposed to beat, you can use it for that. If you want to put monsters in the...

That was my experience for 3.x. In earlier versions of the game (post-UA 1e or 2e), rogues were still disposable, but fighters were essential to adequate damage output. I've noticed in my D&DN playtests that the presence of absence of the front-line fighter once again makes a huge difference...

I think one of the best ways to win people over is to make it super-easy for people to run older D&D adventures with D&DN. I've playtested D&DN with some BECMI modules. They run well, but it takes a little work to figure out the details. It's the sort of thing that the fan base is perfectly...

That is almost exactly what I'm looking for as well. I'd like a game that provides speed and simplicity of play that is closer to BECMI than the WotC editions of D&D, but with sensible modern mechanics and more flexibility. I would also like to see an attempt to solve the problems that 3.x...

I'm not entirely sure about the specifics, but I do like the idea that you can look at a large monster and know that (1) the monster will hit hard and (2) the monster will have a bunch of hit points. This captures one of the strengths of the 3e monster approach: the physical description of a...

How is that different from the example hill giant with an inaccurate but damaging attack? I understand that it uses the term "rage", but the mechanics are fiddly and it's not clear what purpose they serve. -KS