Search results

Conceptually, the place that it will bother me the most is when anything takes place off the two dimensional grid. Are the bad guys 30 feet off the side of the road on a ledge 30 feet off the ground? They're 42 feet away from the PC on the road then, but the non-diagonal counting game is going...

That's not really true. For the Ftr/Clr/Monk/Pal/Pious Templar character, for example, I noted that she doesn't actually have access to any magic tricks of significance and none of the tricks I mentioned involved her spellcasting ability. Now, I would really like to get access to fell the...

I'm not sure how true this is unless you construe the one or two tricks very broadly. Of the characters that I play or play with regularly, this doesn't seem to be the case with many of them. Starting from the top: My highest level character: Fighter 1/Wizard 6/Spellsword 1/Eldritch Knight 10...

I don't know that it starts breaking down. I had a friend in high school who, back in the 2e days was fond of high level campaigns. I never really enjoyed them and the rules definitely did break down there. In 3.x, I've played one Living Greyhawk character to 18th level (and beyond now) another...

Wait a minute? I HAVE to use one prestige class per NPC and have an animal companion? I'll go with an eldritch giant fighter for 500gp and a fighter/marshal/hexblade/blackguard and an anti-CODzilla, a support wizard, a warsinger, and some mid-level mooks who will actually get to be pretty darn...

Actually, one little bit of revision to that last statement. If the DM does decide to use this rule for all the NPCs, over the long run, it will make things significantly more difficult for the PCs. Dropping a bad guy, having him roll a 20 on his survival die and then be up and fighting at 25%...

Note that I'm coming to the conclusing that I reject the design philosophy not the design goals. That said, probably the biggest thing I could do to get faster, more dynamic combat would be to get my group to shut up and let everyone play their characters individually. No game system or design...

Much as westerners are loathe to talk about it openly or in mixed company, humans have a large degree of sexual dimorphism. Though there are individual differences, in general human men are both larger and stronger than human women--and quite significantly so. (Compare the average, median, and...

You miss the beauty of the application. The Lard Monster has the ability as an attack against Fortitude, the Ogre Faticus has it as a follow-up and it is then an attack against AC with a +10 bonus, and the Hutticus Rex has it as a reflex attack (he's in the Monster Manual 3 4e). In each of these...

My experience with 3.5 has given me a deep and abiding hatred of special arrow types. Zombies? Oh, I'll use my serpent tongue arrows. Skeletons? I'll use my blunt arrows. We want to take him alive? I'll use my non-lethal arrows. Rather than being a cool and interesting thing, they instead turned...

To answer the leading questions, let's take them one at a time: There are two points to make here. First the monster with no tricks doesn't get old as quickly as the one trick pony. Why is that? Because the monster with no tricks operates in an ordinary field. Something that is supposed to be...

The poll is meaningless until people see the mechanics associated with the weapons. Show me the powers that spears, axes, swords, etc get and I'll be able to give you a meaningful answer to that one. If one of the weapon types gets noticably stronger or weaker powers, you'll almost certainly see...

Ditto. I'll add that I don't want monsters who are just one cool move. How many times can you fight the bugbear strangler before it becomes old and tired. And how many new and "nifty" bugbears can you fight before all the powers become dull. "We fought the bugbear crippler last week, this week...

Two steps forward or five steps back. It will all depend upon what powers they actually give to the different weapons. The advantage of the 3.x weapon chart is that, other than the exotic weapon master's flurry ability with the spiked chain, none of the weapons were really that different in...

Just because the article said it doesn't mean it isn't stupid. What if the NPCs have healing abilities? Are the NPCs all automatically able to be healed, get up and keep fighting? Or do they die instantly, never having a chance to do the healing? That's a pretty big change in the challenge that...

Actually, from what I've been reading, there is a pretty big difference between 3e and 4e in this regard. As far as I can tell, in 3e, if you want a chimera to challenge a 12th level party, you add hit dice per the MM guidelines, attack bonus, feats, etc, and then when you're done, you take a...

Really? They're all going away? I'm pretty sure I saw an article on D&D Inside that specified the number of item slots that characters have and stated that characters would have to choose between using shields (which would generally have defensive bonuses) and bracers (which would generally have...

Here are my thoughts on "15 minute NPCs" statement. My first thought was "heh. More boilerplate WotC Marketing approved hype. 3e bad. 4e good. Coming from someone whose paycheck depends on people buying 4e, I'll believe the 4e good bit when (and if) I see it. But I've played 3e for 8 years now...

Assuming that the PC in question is a real or wannabe thug. Even considering only modern English, the choice of language places a character in a social context and there are an awful lot more choices than gangsta rappa and Ren Faire style faux Elizabethan. For my part, I would argue that...

It's a supernatural ability and unless they say otherwise, they require a standard ability to activate. So, you can't just use it as your last iterative attack. If you had already activated it in a prior round, however, and were holding the charge, you could use it as any of your iterative...