Search results

A bit of an aside... The GUMSHOE system attacks this issue directly by outright stating that if your party has a reasonable breadth of skills with "1 rank" invested in them, there should be no possibility of a hard dead end. An adventure should never lack this "feature". Judicious use of yet...

It is a matter of scale of fineness/coarseness. In 3e most examples provided are very simple. One could easily imagine an information gathering phase of an adventure being a series of socials skill encounters. You might start the ball rolling with Gather Information. More specific questions...

I think you are looking at too high a level to notice the forest contains different kinds of trees. Repeating my argument from another thread... At a practical level, Fighters are required to get hit to be effective, or, to be more precise, stand where getting hit is practically inevitable in...

At a practical level, combat often is achieving X hits before Y failures, or something bad happens. This is just more abstract than the norm for combat systems in RPGs. Removing the chrome, every PC has an array of abilities. Some are going to be Easy, Medium, or Hard in order to achieve...

Depends how the damage scales, GSHamster. What you describe is a direct consequence of not carefully controlling how damage scales. 3e does so by somewhat indirect means, and is somewhat liberal in allowing bonuses to accrue. 4e (allegedly) is more direct in its approach.

Range matters, obviously. The underlying assumption is that the Fighter must pay the price of getting hit in order to be effective at all. The Wizard lives under no such restriction. The Strikers and Leaders may prefer to stay out of melee (or perhaps not), but they generally do not have the...

It is an invitation for the DM to ask the player what that destiny might be. It is an invitation for the DM and player to collaborate and sketch out a destiny, either before or after the tragic event. In terms of flavor, this makes an immense amount of sense. Of course, the DM always has the...

I would think that more combat options would tend to make Tacticians extremely happy. How fun it is to avoid violent conflict is so style dependent that I would be skeptical of any generalizations. I am looking forward to 4e because of the tactical options, on top of the fact it looks like it...

A lot of these alleged "problems" with 4e healing disappear if start looking at "hit points" as representative of character morale on top of all the other standard explanations. The image of a character surging with excitement and gaining a temporary boost to competence after dispatching a foe...

I would put it another way. There has always been a tension between the functional/practical definition and the literal definition of hit points. In all editions, this has been particularly confusing when it came to healing (both natural and magical) and poison. 4e has not "cured" any of this...

Let's take a step further back... Hit points are an abstraction originally based on mass combat. A single figure on the battle mat is a "unit". A unit might have been, back in the pre-Chainmail days, 100 or 1000 men -- it varied. Zero hit point means the unit is "ineffective". Does that...

They miss spots, and so you have to do a second coat yourself anyway.

I am leaning towards liking the idea of dragonborn as a core race. I dislike the cover. Feels like dreary wannabe anime with too much warhammer influence to me. While I do not expect contemporary fantasy art fashions to adhere to my personal taste (I am well past any desire to be hip and cool...

A held object has a well-defined touch AC. So why not?

When it comes to pulling off fine tuned tactics, such as these, it is far more likely for the players to outscore the DM than the other way around. The DM has one brain, typically with 3-6 NPCs to mind. Each of your players has exactly one PC, and often nothing better to with their time than...

That wins me over, right there. I love it. Less bookkeeping. I just roll the 'duration check' when that time comes. With most monsters I can just roll the die and only bother to check the stat block if the roll is worryingly mediumish (and in most cases assuming DC 10 is going to be close...

When you put it that way, it sounds like a good thing. Let's consider the following thought experiment: At a given character level, you can have your weak & reliable abilities that work 85-100% of the time, the weirdly potent abilities that work 0-15% of the time, and your meat & potatoes...

I think the most common real play annoyances will be as you suggest. The non-big Walls and Stinking Clouds will sometimes be walked around at zero net cost.

On the nose, Hussar.

Looks like a truly awesome deal...for those who were happy to pony up for paper magazines in the past. For most others, it seems like a highly debatable value. I will probably try it for one month -- I am curious.