Recent content by kigmatzomat

You just described Earthdawn. There is no XP, there is Legend. You get more Legend by telling your tales to Libraries and such. It has "attuned" magic items, casters who are slow but powerful and warriors who are lightning fast and can dance across water. Plus kaers; cities that hid...

I'm mostly a DM. I ran 2e from 1st to 23rd-ish (depending on class). That was like 120 4-6hr sessions in college. Plus it was 13 players. I ran 3e from 1st to 22nd. 6-8 players, ran 8 years, biweekly 6hr sessions minus some holidays. It started with just the PHB I got from Gencon 2000...

I'm partial to making the "big bad" someone who is not a direct, personal threat. Like, what if the equivalent of Tallryand or Cato the Elder who spent a non-trivial amount of effort engineering everyone they can get to listen to view the party as a threat, casting their every accomplishment in...

I always thought it should have been geese. Ducks know they are delicious and flee, meanwhile geese know they can break a human's arm and will happily demonstrate.

I like multiclasses that make sense on all sides: character, thematic & utility. Especially when 8 levels after you made your subclass decision, it feels constraining. And at times the GM may need to allow multiclassing if they want a full array of class-features from a smaller party. The...

Probably too close to 3E's templates, which have been considered verboten. 3e was much more modular than 5e around foes as you could upgrade them with templates, more HD or classes. But 3e was way more information dense than 5e, which drives me nuts. Its Web2.0 desiga book. book. 3E was...

Earthdawn has that mechanic. In that game you don't get XP, you get Legend. Tell your tale to one of the Great Libraries and your Legend grows. You turn Legend into karma and skills, and such. Dying is capable of having after effects in ED as well. A special item might become enchanted, a...

Combat roles was one of the really good concepts from 4e that should have carried into 5e. It provides a tactical direction to a GM. When they saw an encounter with a Defender, a Striker, a Controller and three Minions, it was pretty clear how they should run the fight. To your point, a...

I saw the high speed tier 4, but think in our case it was the adventure path. We were doing were good for a level each. The fights were rough but the issue is the plot makes them literally one right after the other. It was far from the 5MWD but typically after lunch we were falling back a...

I am partial to the fey because it doesn't evoke quite the same "end of the world" threat that demons and devils seem to, and yet fey can still traumatize a geographic region. So the PCs could nuke sprites and pixies and such, but that may bring fey knights. Courts of the Shadowfey has some...

Expect party creep. Familiars, steeds, homunculus, awakened trees, rocks True Polymorphed into elementals, etc. So give the baddies a couple extra CR of "class feature minions" on top of the xp budget but there's no XP reward for the PCs any more than from Summon Monster. And killing those...

My personal experience is that zero war gamers are mellow. They are the most meticulous and uptight types I have ever met. Statistics says they must exist, but my mind boggles at the notion of a war gamer saying "just move 12 inches, 13 inches, whatever. No biggie. We're just here to have...

Oh, DMs can get attached to NPCs. Especially dead ones. Those are the best. Us Yellowbeards are never more dangerous than when we're dead Dead bosses can get resurrected, turned to ghosts or other undead, get sent back from the Abyss as a half-demon, or might have started as corpses* or...

Alchemical Monk would have been better...

They gave the monsters a giant pile of hit points and yeah, people looked for non-hit point ways to win. They discouraged using damaging spells and then added auto-successes that work not only against control spells but all save-based events. So yeah, people spam the lowest level...