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I had a DM who seemed to have this uncanny ability. Or he faked it awful well. I certainly could not have done it myself!

Odd that the Orb is ranking so lowly, these days.

What I liked about sneak attack is that it got the lightly armored guy to race into combat to make a key blow. They had the skills to do it (tumble) and the class appealed to people who liked calculated risks. I just liked the idea of doing it to the Drow Lich as well as the annoying High...

Sadly, it only seems to exist as a PDF. :-(

I'd like to think that there is an important difference between a few tweaks to keep the game running smoothly and a focus on hyper-optimization. There are already a few things that the rogue can do with skills that are not straightforwardly physical possible. They can evade a fireball in a...

I am new to the Gainesville area (just moved here in the past couple of months) and would be interested in forming or joining a group. I play a lot of things. I will do 4E D&D. I slightly prefer older editions (I have 1E, 2E, 3.5E, Pathfinder and Castles&Crusades). Haven't done Traveller in...

Undead are even worse than oozes and constructs. Clerics can turn them, for example, making the armored full caster class stronger against the exact creatures that the fighters and rogues are weakest against. This would make more sense if there were common creatures against whom the cleric...

I am not sure that I am delighted by the role-playing consequences of the Arcane power source. It not always been my experience that linking power use to in world consequences is a good idea; less so when the arcane power source began balanced with the other power sources. But I'll wait and...

I found it very hard to eliminate prestige classes in 3.0/3.5 even if I wanted to. Player's focused on them and it seemed to annoy people all out of proportion when you removed a beloved prestige class. It was actually easiser to set the rules as "core only" in my own experience. But I agree...

I used to only assess XP at the end of an adventure and freeze the XP at that total (so players would be really encouraged to train before taking on a new quest). That way nobody would end up multiple levels behind. I also used it to make it impossible for daul class humans to gain several...

I had thought that aspect of 3E was harking back to AD&D 1E where I remember a very vibrant house rules culture. The 1E DMG was filled with ideas about how to houserule things and no game I ever saw used all of it at once. It's not that 3E was unfriendly to houserules (it's very friendly) but...

I like training and think it was a good idea. The cost factor in 1E made it hard to implement but it had a lot of nice features to it. Self training made it possible to get to the higher levels -- it just took more resources. The issue with the 1E training system was cost was too linear: at...

Traveller is a fine game. It's very differently built and balanced than more modern games but it manages to catch the spirit of early science fiction surprisingly well. It sneaks in most of the iconic elements and the random character generation makes each character automatically come fleshed...

I think it is fine to start with the PHB and find the key tables in the DMG as they are needed. The DMG is a GREAT book but it's more a collection of essays and a patchwork of ideas for specific things that Gygax did in his campaigns than a systematic document. The Gamma World and Boot Hill...

It also has distorting edge effects. If you need an 18 to hit an opponent you can do so with 0.5% chance with 3d6 and 15% chance with d20. Even assumptions like a natural 20 always hits (and thus a natural 18 always hits on 3d6) make extremely high AC radically more valuable (as, if you can...

It is a double edged sword. The character builder is popular because it is fast, summarizes all of the data in a single place and audits the character for legality. It's also supposed to simplify calculations, but I find it does a mixed job of that. But it makes the effort in checking the...

In you are not careful, this can do the opposite of the stated intention of the use of 3d6 by making hitting functionally impossible. It's not that hard actually -- a few penalties applied to players and an enemy with a high AC can be only hit on a 16+ (annoying in d20, pretty much a game ender...

One nice aspect of this approach is that all players will tend to have a single level of a prestige class which will put them back into the "adding flavor and uniqueness" range in a way that an admixture of prestige classes really does not.

I think that 3.0 Haste is a very good example of a game rule (in this case a spell) that wasn't an ideal piece of design. There are always going to be issues like that in any non-trival game. Some flaws are so large that they make the game unenjoyable or completely unplayable. It's rare to...

To each their own. I'm not sure where the "character is dead issue" comes from unless the player is a) flying at a great height and b) doesn't expend resources planning for a fall. A 10th level mage shouldn't be a in a great deal of trouble taking 10d6 damage, for example. WIth a range of...