Recent content by JonWake

Gamma Ray Games is great. So is Phoenix games on Broadway.

Oooh, and exiled Fighter who learned the Terrible Truth behind the Thirty Years War. If they knew who they were really fighting for, everything would change. But he needs proof.

I'd pay real money for a book of backgrounds.

Awesome! I suspected that there wasn't much difference, but to outsiders the martial traditions of kenjutsu can be pretty opaque. As far as Strength Vs. Dexterity goes, 'realistically', once you have the requisite strength to move the sword around, there's a bit of diminishing returns on...

Nah, mostly it's because we don't actually care that much.

Just to flog that dead horse even more, the design of the katana was a solution to an engineering problem: how to make a resilient blade when you have access to crummy materials? Japanese steel was terrible (in fact, the impetus for the attack on Pearl Harbor was the US cutting off steel...

I heard a guy with a katana once cut Hitler in half, but the sword was so sharp he didn't die until 1946.

If a longsword isn't finesse, neither is a katana. A katana is usually heavier than a longsword. A katana is also more blade heavy than a longsword. Whereas the German longsword style relies on quick, snapping counter cuts, the kenjutsu style of the katana uses powerful, two-handed cleaving...

Night of the Walking Dead was the first RPG product I even bought. I didn't even have the player's handbook. The 5e zombies will be dangerous as all get out.

Wow, how'd I know you'd ask this? Okay, let's lay this out, kiddies. 1. I don't have time to write a whole game. It's harder than it looks. 2. Not liking one element of a game does not translate into hating the whole game, despite what idiots on the internet tell you. 3. The designers do not...

No, I don't think so. Though honestly, I think some people saying 'wait for the DMG' mean 'my god won't you shut up about X rule oversight?' They're just being polite. ;) What I want from the DMG is a set of hacks. I don't need it to cover all my bases, or all my tweaks, but having some...

Mike Mearls mentioned that he was working on the Wounds / Vitality system for 5e based on Wounds reducing your Max HP, like energy drain does. He mentioned that it was set up so a portion of damage went to reducing Max HP, so if you have 10 HP and are hit with 8 damage, your current HP is 2 but...

I cannot state it any better than Monte Cook. "Now the people who'd say this are awful." Exactly. This is the sort of second guessing, look out of lawyers and loopholes kind of design I just don't want to do anymore. The epiphany actually came to me in the middle of a panel at a convention...

Must be hard to drink your your pinky that high in the air. Dude's written over 50 novels. 5-0. He's made his living in the hardest profession out there. Any chucklehead can go out and get a job in IT and write a novel on their weekends. Doing it day-in, day out for thirty years, and working...

But it's 2-handed, so no shield for you.