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Showing posts from September, 2008

D&D 4e: Surrender or Die!

An unusual situation arose in a game last week. We discovered that the Intimidate skill allows you to make an Intimidate roll to force Bloodied opponents to surrender. This significantly shortened fights and actually made the game more interesting that just stomping over piles of corpses. I'm not sure if it is meant to be so powerful but I do think it works better than the old Red Box morale rules where the GM had to dice to see if the monsters wanted out. This way the morale collapse of the monsters is actually player initiated unless the GM things the encounter is hopeless for the monsters.

Paizo Pathfinder Beta

I picked up the Pathfinder playtest at GenCon UK and I have found it quite intriguing. I actually quite liked D&D 3e and while I respect the 4e design a lot, the baby went out with the bathwater for a lot of play styles. Having seen a lot of the new ideas in 4e though it is quite hard to go back to 3e and I hope that Pathfinder is going to square the circle here by having a more flexible, less combat-orientated and prescriptive games system while fixing flaws. What kind of things do I mean? Well the rest tendency, dead levels and avoiding classes with too many one shot powers. I'm reading through at the moment but it is difficult because so much of it familiar I keep tending to skip read.