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 Recent Posts
If you ask me, the damage dealt a shocking grasp discharged into water would be divided among the targets in the water. It probably shouldn't do full damage to all characters in the area, because that's giving shocking grasp the effect of a fireball, which is a little too powerful a bonus just for there being some water.
The entropomancer is treated as if he were using a talisman of the sphere. If he also has a real talisman of the sphere, he's treated as having two talismen. Two talismen don't do any more than one. The entropomancer can just do it without the item and without any risk to himself. If I had a player in my Age of Worms playing an Entropomancer, I'd not hand out the talisman. It's more special if the player gets to use his prestige class' entire purpose in the final battle, rather than sharing that with someone else who found a random magic item.
I think it's a very American thing to tip; it's not considered mandatory in the UK. If you want to reward someone for good service you might tip them, or let them keep the change, but they wouldn't be offended; a little disappointed, maybe. It's not rude to not tip someone here, is what I think I'm grasping at. It's not saying "You did a terrible job and I'm not paying you", it's saying, "Okay the price is £5 I am paying £5 here you go"
Whites live in harmony with nature, blacks are superhumanly strong and all hate whites, hispanics are dour and taciturn, asians like to play pranks, native Americans are dextrous and sneaky, and middle easterns were built thirty years ago for the Last War? I think The Koga has his list a little out of whack... either you live in an unusual country, or you play a particularly wacky D&D setting! (I resent being called an elf)
That's fair. A good thing about a writing-based game like this is that it's entirely plausible to ignore certain aspects and let the players' imaginations fill in the rest. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder, "Y'know, if such-and-such an NPC is described as having white hair and brown eyes, surely he must have a skin colour too? Does every human have the same skin colour as him? If not, what ethnicities exist in the world and what effect does it have?" Then I run a game, describe an enemy NPC, and the players are like, "Aye, whatever. I cast disintegrate. Wait, do I have to roll initiative first or do I get a surprise round or what?"
I used to. The dice bag I made burst, though, and I currently use those plastic boxes of dice that might crack if you carry them around in your pocket. I have a smaller dice bag, but it's reserved for D6s to keep them apart from my other dice in my wooden box to make it easier to find individual dice - I have precisely 20d6 in the bag. I can't carry dice loose because they get mixed up in my change. My current dice box is identical to the one with the hand in it in The Mighty Boosh. (Except, dice.)
Indeed, I recommend using the Greyhawk ethnic traits. If 95% of the NPCs in a given adventure path are caucasian, readers who are used to multi-ethnic communities might find this unrealistic. It'd be as bad a mistake as having 95% of NPCs be humans rather than at least a noticeable portion of elves, dwarves and the like. (Looks like this thread was double-posted; I suggest that nobody post in this thread's duplicate, so that it will eventually fall off the back page)
I read once in Monte Cook's blog that he'd taken a trip to Ireland and was much impressed with the castles he saw, finding out much about how "real" castles looked (no ten-foot corridors, for one). I was quite surprised that someone would fly from America just to see Carrickfergus Castle, since it's only fourteen miles away from my house. Kids to to it on school trips, it's just an old building with a gift shop. Then you realise that they don't have castles at all in America, and that's why American D&D players are impressed that they can see the real thing today.
My own rule is that the player characters cannot level up until they've shared a round of drinks in a tavern (to celebrate their victory, naturally), and then had a good night's sleep (to sleep on it). It's a silly rule, but then it's a silly group of players - having purchased four of everything in the Equipment chapter, they once circumvented my restriction in an emergency situation by sitting down in the equipment-wagon before nightfall and breaking out four mugs and the barrel of ale.
An enhancement bonus stacks with anything except another enhancement bonus to the same property, in this case natural armour. Thus if I play a lizardfolk with +5 natural armour and buy an Amulet of Natural Armor, I can give myself even more natural armour. It makes for a lot of armor class but then I did pay a level adjustment to get to be a lizardfolk and a lot of money to get the amulet.
I use mine to set off traps. Fifty thousand gold pieces worth of sigils dealing 40d6 fire damage to everyone in the corridor, and it just got wasted on a ten hit point zombie. Dungeons usually alternate between traps and monsters, so each opponent we faced would save us from one trap afterward. A player of mine is cleverer. He killed a gray render and raised it as skeleton, then had a throne built inside the chest to ride around in.
1) Cheaper items that do 1-2 cool things are better than expensive items that do 3+ cool things. I learned this the hard way a year or two ago when I made a magic item for an army of demons granting three spell-like abilities and an armor bonus. The item ended up costing 47,000 gp! (In retrospect, I should have just created a variant demon.) 2) All magic items should be useful to PCs in their adventures. (No magic plows!) Bah. There goes my "Magic Items For Commoners" article. 3) Fewer cooler items heavily detailed are better than lots of less cool items. At first I disliked longer articles, feeling that I was getting cheated out of my items, but when you put it that way I think it opens up the opportunity for some really cool items that can inspire a player or DM instead of merely handing them some raw magic items.
I'd always get annoyed with kids who, when playing board games, would count the square they were on as "one" and progress stepping on each square and counting as they went. I always suspected they were doing it deliberately to land on the wrong squares and avoid hazards. In retrospect, if they kept shilling themself out of one square a turn they can't have been clever enough to do that.
That said - if you, as the dungeon designer, work out what X monster does in a normal day and then provide some kind of a background and rational you go a long way to giving your dungeons a feeling of authenticity. Your players won't find out any significant amount of this information however when they do work out some element and it follows logically from the environment your dungeons will feel and seem much more authentic. That's basically what I like. Perhaps, most of the time, the players don't question why there are orcs is guarding the pie, because the real reason is that they're there to kill the orc and take his pie. Sometimes though, it's nice for players to forget that, and not all players enjoy this style of play. By having your encounters make sense, you put something there for players who like to think about things and make it more three-dimensional even if it provides little or no game benefit. Why are there orc zombies in here? The orcs must have a necromancer who's raising their fallen numbers. What are all these fire giants doing in the caverns of the red dragon's lair? They must be working for him. You shouldn't open an oaken door and see a gray render alone; what motivation could he possibly have? If trapped, why hasn't he escaped? Why does he attack you upon entering? Why does he fight to the death? What's worst is when you're caught out and the player realises that there IS no real reason for monster X to be guarding treasure Y, and nothing makes a game feel flat more quickly.
It contains a five-level prestige class called the Aeromancer which requires 11 wizard levels, grants two levels of spell progression, and for the other three levels gives you the ability to create areas of deadening air (all spells of a certain school or type require a spellcraft check to be cast) and magical flux (all spells of a certain school or type have a certain metamagic applied). It's more about magical storms than the magic of storms, to be honest. If the above prestige class appeals to you, then definitely buy a copy. If not, I suspect that you will find the rest of the article of little use.
An advantage of D&D being word-based is that DMs don't have to specify which race their human NPCs are, or rather, not race but ethnicity. We simply say, "A tall man in half-plate armour" and let the player decide for themselves which of the real-world human races he resembles most, since it's not really important to the game. Of course, a human in any given D&D world must have one skin tone or another, a certain eye colour, and so on. This has gotten me thinking - in D&D, how many ethnicities are we likely to see and how do they differ? If I walk into Sharn, Waterdeep or Greyhawk, will I see dark-skinned humans as well as fair-skinned, and if so, do the dark-skinned humans and fair-skinned humans originate from different regions of the game world? I believe that Faerun says "Yes, humans have all real-world ethnicities and more" while Eberron says "It's not important, ignore it". What I'm wondering is, what do you think about it, how is it in your game world, and how much does it really matter?
You might like to check out Complete Arcana which as some nice ninth level spells. Alternatively you can try the Complete Book of Eldritch Might of which the following 9th level spells might interest you: You can also use metamagic in those slots to cast empowered 7th level spells or maximized 6th level.
It is a peeve of mine when dungeons don't make sense. They're popular because not everyone particularly minds illogical dungeons as long as they're interesting, especially so younger players or new players. Still, I cringe every time I read an adventure and come across an unlikely encounter that's explained away by a contrived excuse. Some examples: 1. You enter the chamber to find the door slam behind you and a pair of red eyes peer out of the darkness, speaking in Abyssal "The mortal who bound me to this room eight centuries ago is long dead... I shall exact my slow, cruel revenge on you instead!" Plausible. There's a reason for the monster to be here, a reason for him to not have left, and a reason for him to attack. The players should later discover why someone would bind a demon to a room at all. 2. As you begin to force open the suspiciously unattended treasure chest, ooze drips from the ceiling and begins to burn through your clothes. Suddenly, a massive blob snaps out and glomps over you... Plausible. The ooze probably lives here, is attracted by movement, and eats anything who comes in. The treasure was somebody's but they got eaten. The ooze hasn't left because it's a constant supply of food. 3. There's a big rock in the middle of the room. It awakens when you enter to reveal that it's an earth elemental, because it was in... some kind of elemental hibernation? Not so plausible. (Apologies!)
To introduce a new magic system or similar into the game, there are generally two ways to do it. The first way is to assume it's almost unheard of, and ask yourself why. Your player might help here. Perhaps it's simply a new thing. Entire adventures and plots might be built around investigating what it is and where it comes from. Perhaps it's not new, but it's a closely guarded secret that your player character has stumbled across or been entrusted with. From here, it might remain a secret or might become increasingly more popular in the world. The other way is to assume it's quite well known in your game world, and to integrate it accordingly. This does require that you understand the system yourself at least as well as your player does, preferably better. For example, there may be psion guilds in your world, or military leaders might frequently use incarnum.
I didn't really like BESM D20 / Anime D20. It felt like they'd taken Tri-Stat and shoehorned it into the D20 system just to latch on to D20's popularity. It tries to mix Tri-Stat's classless system with D20's class system, so either everyone plays the same class (thus defeating the point of a class system) or you get silly genre-mixing combinations like a samurai and a Pokemon trainer. It piles Tri-Stat's points-based Attributes system on top of D20's own feats, skills and class systems, rather than, say, doing away with several feats and converting the rest to Attributes.
Apostolic is pronounced "appa stollick", as any Catholic will tell you since it's used in the Nicene Creed. I have no idea on the official pronunciation of "Kyuss", although I'm sure there is one by whoever invented the fellow, and I'd quite like to know before I start running Age of Worms. I'd say DRAG-oth-ah.
I think what Jason is saying is that the magazine can't condone the online distribution of content it holds the copyright to. I wouldn't take it personally; even if they don't have a problem with it themselves, the editors are responsible for keeping on top of the magazine's properties. If you're not distributing it publically, I don't think Dragon would really have a problem with it. I'd really like to see it, personally. (Perhaps you could strike a deal with Paizo and they could sell it in their shop? :)
I'm agreeing with James. "Excessive" means "excessive even by D&D's standards of violence". Murder and the occasional headlopping are fine, but when you spend a lot of time simply describing gore for gore's sake, I think that's where it crosses the line. Let the DM add in more gore if he wants, he's not tied to using your descriptions verbatim.
I doubt that roleplayers are much more likely than most people to have passports. Moreso than average, because nerdy types are probably more likely to travel than small-town folk who rarely leave their town. Leaving America is pretty expensive, since you have to go by plane if you want to visit anywhere much more exotic than another state. As such, less wealthy people won't be able to afford to go anywhere they need a passport for. Compare that to Europe where you can drive to another country. Americans are also more likely to be of the opinion that their country is the best country in the world, and as such would be less likely to want to travel to other, "lesser" countries. Lastly, the population density of Europe means that public transport is better and more commonly used than America, and therefore not everyone drives; as such they may get a passport as a photo ID if they are more likely to spend their money on a holiday than on a car.
I was under the impression that publishers had to affix an OGL notice for their use of the SRD (the game system, monsters, spells etc), but that they weren't required to release their own content under the same license. I see a lot of people who release their products as open content, which from a business point of view doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
Actually, as far as I'm aware, Paizo owns the rights to everything they print. If you write an article for Dragon, they buy all the rights from you. They can print it in the magazine, they can scrumple it up and throw it in the bin, and they can let Wizards print your content in their latest expansion book without paying you anything (although you would get credited in the book).
Is it common for professionals to add such random pieces of opinion/information to a review that have no backing or even mention in the article itself? Yes. It's called "bad journalism". To some extent it's unavoidable, since journalists may be forced to omit details due to lack of space or a lack of time and money to fully research the topic they're writing on. Sometimes, a journalist will have his facts wrong, and sometimes they'll just plain make stuff up because they know they can get away with it and that it largely won't matter. They might even embellish things just to make a more catchy story in the hopes of his story getting famous. Journalists, in other words, aren't experts in the fields they report on, have limited resources, and not all of them are honest.
A running theme in my last campaign was carts and wagons, and tying people to the back of them. They began with a chocobo-drawn cart which they would use to increase the amount of loot they could take with them. New party members would be recruited by being tied to the back of a moving cart until they agreed to join. Opponents would be carried in the cart while tied to the back, and when they awoke they would be kicked out of the cart and forced to run along after it while being interrogated. Why did they do this? A cart once saved that player's life in a previous campaign. His Bag of Holding was torn open and the contents spilled out, including a cart he'd somehow fit in there. He hid under the cart to gain full cover from the lich they were fighting, and the lich was hovering at the ceiling so he couldn't see under the cart. After the fight, the cart proved convenient in carrying out all the loot, but getting the cart out through narrow corridors proved a challenge.
Ah, sounds like a textbook case of "Player becomes the DM but is still stuck in the Player mindset". He's still thinking like he was when he was in the role of a player, and isn't seeing things from the DM's position. This is why he runs a character of his own, doesn't know monster stats and only has races and deities that he likes - that's what a player would do. I once ran a campaign where the only races were human and planetouched - of course, humans were the only race without a level adjustment. I later realised that people really liked having the option of playing from a variety of races, and that a lot of the time the DM really has to bend to the players' choices instead of the other way around, if it makes for a more fun game.
Guys, guys, I've got it. Imagine a water elemental. No, bigger. No, bigger still! Imagine it's so huge that it's like a tsunami rising over the city with people screaming and running in fear. It approaches too slowly, and soon - not just yet, but soon - it will dump itself onto the city and kill every man, woman and child who couldn't run fast enough. Now imagine instead of a water elemental, it's a barbarians elemental.
I have a question for the editors as well as DMs and players. There's a lot of talk with the new adventure path about moving away from dungeon crawls and doing more investigation, wilderness, and so forth. How much do you enjoy playing in straightforward dungeon crawls or running dungeon crawls, and how much demand do the magazine's staff see for dungeon adventures compared to more modern types?
Even if the magazines weren't contractually obliged so, it's not in their best business interests to release their stuff for free. When magazines sell out they still sell back issues, and when those sell out they can still sell PDF copies. To be honest I'm baffled that anyone who sells D&D products would particularly want to release their stuff as OGL. It's essentially saying, "I'm going to sell this for $5, but it's perfectly legal for a competitor to basically copy it word-for-word and resell it."
Monte Cook once recommended them on his forums and Amazon sold out of its remaining copies quickly. These events may or may not be related; at least one of the buyers evidently put his copy back up on Amazon New & Used for double the price. I suppose at least I can rest in the knowledge that I'm saving myself the effort of converting so much old stuff ;)
I have to admit that I'm not so much a fan of Grimcleaver's system, since it sacrifices the status quo in the name of realism. In truth, the current system is a big abstraction which sacrifices realism in favour of straightforwardness. If it's troubling that a high level person should be able to take a lethal injury ten times over and survive, then players should remember that damage does not translate into injury on a linear scale. Rather, the more hit points you have left, the less actual injury you take from any given amount of "damage"; hit points do not necessarily represent the ability to take more injury, but to take more damage.
Power components are items that you can use in lieu of spending XP on a certain item. They're easily given as treasure because you can set a nice gold piece value on them - off the top of my head, I've heard 5gp per XP spoken of somewhere. Mayhaps that should be more like 10gp per XP since in a 25gp item you save 12.5gp and 1XP by making it yourself.
A subcategory on the boards for each issue might lead to many threads being squirrelled away. By the tenth issue, I'd have to check ten boards just in case someone posts something interesting on an adventure I've already run. Not all threads necessarily discuss something limited to a single issue. I do like the idea of prefixing threads with the issue number where relevant, like so: #135: Should I let the PCs keep Kyuss' morningstar?
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