Search results

Agreed. The designers are so far going out their way to provide "plain English" descriptions, and trying to solve usual RPG system problems such as stacking without providing generic rules for them. Even a moderate amount of bonus stacking is going to be a problem in the bounded accuracy model...

Customer Support might be ok with it, if they know about your email and anit-virus systems. I'd suspect an anti-phishing setting on your computer or email system. The survey link doesn't go to a WotC server. You might also be able to get at the underlying link and copy/paste it into a browser...

These are very useful starting points, thank you! I'm just in the process this weekend of separating out some of the published mechanics from the "engine" I am making for test-running adventures (so I can drop in other mechanics, house rules etc a little more easily). After that, I think an...

The ability to homebrew races and monsters is important to me. Classes less so. PC races seems just as easy as before. I'm fond of the strong guidelines that cropped up early in the 4E community, and of how racial powers can be made to scale and stay relevent in that game. D&D Next's...

Put it the other way around: Whatever the second-level spell the Wizard has that improves a non-Rogue's stealth, it shouldn't make that character better than a 3rd level Rogue stealth specialist. If you cannot conceive of or create an Invisibility power that doesn't meet that constraint, then...

It's only for skills and checks where a skill modifier is used. The inititiative bonus is not a skill modifier. Edit: A quick search for "inititiative" in the class and background/skill sections didn't show anything.

I'm writing it myself in a programming language, Perl. This gives me more control of structure than using a spreadsheet or a specialist maths program. I hear good things about Mathemetica though, if you know maths but not so much computing. One non-D&D goal I have in the next few weeks is to...

Depends how it happened . . . If players or monsters have deliberately put down darkness (or fog) to cover an escape, I think disadvantage all round is reasonable, because that makes their gambit relevent. If DM has dropped darkness down on two teams because it seemed like fun (or they forgot...

I would say not, technically it's Homebrewing. Whether or not it is then fair, for the group as a whole, is still open to debate, whatever you categorise your game setup as. It may be better to either to explain that the game world concept makes a fire specialist a bit vulnerable, or that you...

Yes spells. They often retained their spell level when moving from AD&D to 3E, without making allowances for how they affected the game, and how they shifted balance of class effectiveness around. The general feel I get from looking at the 3E and before spell lists is a collection of cool ideas...

I think that's what I'm aiming at, some buckets that represent different "qualities" of adventuring day. I am not that sure about this approach, but I may well go ahead and implement it, since it looks quite easy to code (as opposed to e.g. spellcasting!), and it might give some more insight...

In fact pemerton's suggestion is less ambiguous, because it's clearer when the assessment is made. If you roll a 1 on the d6 in the original wording, does "cannot breathe fire again for 1 round" include this round or not? Does a roll of 1 mean breathe / not breathe / breathe or breathe, then...

In my groups, Use Rope ended up far more important than Use Magic Item! It's probably a hold-over from very old school play styles, but it was very common practice back in the day to solve dungeon problems with mundane equipment. Iron spikes, 10' poles, silvered mirrors. And the most common...

It's a balancing act. Diminishing returns occuring too early will mean that "best" characters are jack-of-all-trades, and will cause optimisers to homogenise their characters. As an extreme example, I experimented for a short while with a system which allowed all bonuses to "stack", but pushed...

Thanks, I'm enjoying coding it. At the moment Histogram 1 would have 2 columns . . . as the standard adventuring day I have assumed is two "tough" encounters. That could change of course. Histogram 2 is one of the stats issues I am stuck on. There are multiple party members, so just...

Yes, I can and will do these checks. I am reaching for easy tests right now, as coding up all the class features, feats and monster traits, even for first level, is going to take a while. I think my ultimate "baseline" will look something like this: 1) Adventuring party: Fighter, Cleric...

My three-dwarf fighting team is doing well out of it. Mostly I want to know at the moment so I can code it. And it is much easier to code last-second decisions based on actual damage, than to try and pick best choice for a computer in advance. As for play by humans, I much prefer last-second...

Also, are DM's out there requiring use of Parry and/or Protect before or after knowing the damage so far? My reading is a generous after. Which makes stacking even more of an advantage (no need to waste ED on low damage hits, if you think something worse is coming before your next turn).

Also, if you have two fighters, can one Protect the other, whilst the other uses Parry, effectively reducing a single attack by two rolls of ED? It isn't obviously disallowed (or non-stackable), and would be a very useful front-row combination against a heavy-hitting opponent.

I've been reading how Fighter's Expertise Dice work again, as I've started to implement them (so I can compare "always use Deadly Strike" versus "always Protect"). I noticed something I missed. It looks like if a Dwarf missed a hobgoblin, then they'd still have their 1d6 available to Parry. So...