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I too find it somewhat dissatisfying to simply say something like 'okay, you're there now' to hand wave long periods of travel. So I generally do my best to come up with a couple of ways to make a long travel time actually feel like a long travel time. 1) 'random' monster attacks. These are...

I have to agree that HP and falling damage are two serious abstractions... for myself, falling damage is handled according to the actual 9.8m/s^2 and results in falling damage escalating to 22d6 by 80 feet and still increasing geometrically from there... in other words, only proper super humans...

Yup, and it all gets monotonous and tedious by the second or third dungeon, so the decision to turn it into a dice roll was not totally unjustified. The way I handle it now is by having the search dice roll, if it is a success, give the player's a 'funny feeling' that something is there to be...

One way I like to handle cursed magic items is through deceiving the players about what the items are actually doing. For example, the +3 longsword is actually curing the demons you are trying to slay with it. The players have to figure out, in the middle of the battle, why all the damage they...

Tons of people can, all you need is a flame thrower =p But in all seriousness, as I'd hope you'd be able to figure out, I was really referring to the skill system and, to a lesser degree, the physical combat side of things, although the number of 'mooks' a 5th level character can handle...

Actually, the 3rd edition rules were surprisingly realistic, as long as you realized that although they supported 1st through 20th levels in actual fact 5th to 6th level represented the peak of normal human capability. As in Conan or Aragorn would be 5th or 6th level characters. That you could...

Gary's logic sort of goes off its own rails a bit though. He says "In summation, most players find that the game of seeking and gaining, with the ensuing increase in character capability is the thing. Combat at best is something to be done quickly so as to get on with the fun,.." If the goal...

I just ran this puzzle last night. The players entered a large chamber, on the far side was a door leading to the dead king's crypt and all of his treasure. There were 8 stone statues of giant elven warriors arranged around the chamber. Inside the chamber were 4 pillars, each pillar of which...

An alternate way to run this idea, and perhaps lessen your bookkeeping and keep magic from totally running out of control, might be to have all classes run as normal except that all classes have access to a feat that allows them to choose and cast a single sorcerer spell of appropriate level...

A lot of these attacks seem to assume that the victim is being hit with a particular weapon/damage type. How would a club cut you in three for example? That mostly seems to just be a flavor issue though, readily resolved by a judgment call at the table. The guy's dead in any case, probably...

13/22 and I never seen Unearthed Arcana in my life =p I thought the pike one was a bit of a cheat. They have a vanilla pike anywhere in the polearms quiz and I kind of meta-quized and thought that can't be right, pike must be the first one =[ I'm also bitter I got the lucerne hammer wrong...

Thanks for the thoughts Gilladian. At this point only one player has expressed any interest at all in magic, but if it turns out that the other players' interest is perked, other rings can certainly be found. As far as balance goes, the powers are really not actually more powerful than...

I think your poll option needs to include inventing an alphabet. Who among us has not created their own set of ancient runes for players to decipher in order to open the door/disable the trap/whatever? In addition to that very common usage of language creation, when high school was not taking...

As far as my players know, my campaign setting is basically non-magic. They did not have access to magic using characters (though at high levels most of the classes do have magic-like supernatural abilities, for the most part all classes are variants of martial classes), and enemy magic users...

Formians are pretty cool and unique as invaders imo

I disagree. You roll for your HP every level, and you roll for your starting stats (in most games), so why not roll for the rest? In my games everything is rolled for at every level up, including feats and skill points. The randomization is part of the fun; it's what makes special characters...

I think that as long as we're discussing nerfing high-level magic users, we need to also discuss buffing low-level ones--especially wizard/sorcerer d4 hd types that are completely useless without their spells (druids, bards, and clerics are at least decent at physical combat). I think a lot of...

It's very rare that wizards and warriors are 'balanced' in fantasy ime. Some of the series I've read: Wheel of Time: Casters completely run this world; non-caster characters are given things to do of course, but in actuality all non-caster characters are completely at the mercy of casters...

Awesome links all, thanks muchly!

Awesome, this is just what I needed