The Gaming Den

If you're going to justify the WoF table by a combo system, why not just make the combat system like a combo system? Just make it so everyone can use anything all the time if they wish, but make it optimal to rotate between your abilities. The obvious toy model for this is rock-paper-scissors; you'r...

Well, at least the people in the thread are saying "WFT Steve? What you thinking? How is we supposed to playtest this?"

This thread is still bad.

But hilariously so. Ok, maybe not hilarious. But I don't know why you'd be surprised. This is an 18 page thread at TGD.

Also, hi Kaelik! Don't worry, you're included in my slashfic too. I didn't forget you.

No... fuck those dudes. Thats some e-peen envy, so the implcation being to discredit frank by strength of 1 mistaken comment. Didn't your mom always tell you not to speak with your mouth full? Dude just occasionally likes to make up shit and never (rarely?) admits he's wrong. Its fun to tweak, sinc...

I get making TV's, better education, etc. I even get modeling shit like what's better given you have a certain set of preferences. I'm just not seeing how shit like "how much should we value future generations compare to our generation?" is necessarily something you measure or even want to...

In response to K, I'm already aware of that sort of thing, but it's pretty preliminary. And problematically, it confirms the somewhat obvious that happiness is... not as tightly tied to material well being as one would hope. It doesn't help that I don't consider happiness a goal to be achieved throu...

I've also already repeated that these understandings of "wellbeing" are in fact statements about what is good for people, which is something that the scientific method as applied by a whole horde of scientific disciplines does a better job of defining and evaluating than basically any oth...

That PrC is awesome.

But where the fuck is my guillotine?

You're right. No branch of science in all of recorded history has indicated even slightly which things are good for us, and even if we knew those things, there is no way to prove that things which are good for us are good for us, it must just be accepted that "good for us" is equivalent t...

The assumption that people maximize wellbeing is either fairly weak (in that you're only stating they try to maximize the shit they like the most) or just plain wrong (not everyone agrees on the relative rankings of various goods, and people will certainly come into conflict over resource allocation...

I don't think there is any one optimal resolution mechanic, but it would be interesting to determine what's optimal for a particular game's design. For example, although it could be impractical, you could in theory do a bunch of design work specifying what sort of range of successes/failures you wan...

There exist within team evil more than psychotic madmen who are unable to contribute to a group setting and disney villains. There are clerics of tyranny who follow laws to the highest order and uphold order in the land while at the same time crushing what some might perceive as "freedom."...

There's nothing wrong with certain tasks never being trivial as you level (maybe your game just doesn't let characters reach that level of skill). Maybe you don't want diplomacy to be like mind control. Whatever. But if you want some tasks represented by the same mechanical ability, say thievery, to...

A Centaur can't get to the Riders of Rohan. They basically miss the first encounter out of the Shire (the inn) and never even meet up with the Ranger. Legolas isn't at the inn either. And this is LotR. The centaur can split off all the goddamn time because the book barely even tries to keep everyon...

You can't really do Lord of the fucking Rings in any version of D&D. Well, not without it completely sucking ass. Fuck, you can use it as a model of how you usually shouldn't run D&D. Don't split the party 3 fucking ways (or is it more at some points?). Don't have helpless characters who's p...

Holy shit, I can't believe there are 4 fucking pages of arguments about whether its better to roll for initial reactions and have the MC arbitrarily set modifiers to guarantee against shit he doesn't want happening (like PC's walking into a shop to buy something and the shopkeeper randomly whipping ...

I am not making any unfounded assumptions. The rules would have to not suck for it to be better, but since we are talking about the abstract of rules vs no rules, it's understood that we can have good rules. And yes, knowing or looking up the rules has to be worth it, but again, it usually is, and ...

Not having a rule and using "common sense" is not better than having a rule. What different people view as common sense differs. If your ideas are different from the DM, then everything you ever try gets shot down, and that's retarded. If you have actual rules, then your characters live i...

The best compromise I can think of is to have magic swords be rarish, set the game difficulty so that the assumption is that you don't have one, and then simply accept that your character is hitting above his weight class for the rest of the game if and when a magic sword shows up. How basically ev...

What you have there is actually two problems: * The game is actually very low risk. Seriously, the base challenges are pretty much complete non-threats even at supposedly "hard" levels of XP budgeting. * The "attention span" of PCs is very low. That is, a PC doesn't get many rou...

Well, 4e-ish is fair enough, but solid? Has anyone played Essentials into the double-digit levels to see if it falls apart just like 4e? Well, the Warlord's not in essentials, so I imagine there's less issues with "lol, I hit everything on a 2, cuz the taclord battle captain buffed me." O...

I was in a group with 5 others, and each of them lied about how much money they had when it came time to get food. I went to pick up supper, but when I got back I found out I was on the hook for all the pizza myself, in retrospect I should have taken mine and thrown the rest in the snow. Tell them ...

What K said. Give players a reason to end buffs if you want to see them end. You can even build in bonuses for ending buffs. Like maybe you have bonus fire damage from the wizard's flamesword spell, but you can choose to end it to unleash a super-special awesome attack. Also, seriously somehow effec...

Maybe its supposed to be limited in that everyone's not smart enough or charismatic enough to use it. Due to differences between various D&D settings and other what not, I'd say this isn't really a serious limitation in most D&D settings. Still what are you saying you want? Specifically I m...

That depends on precisely what the fuck you mean by magic. Maybe magic is extremely rare, volatile, and difficult to impossible to use systematically, preventing it from making any serious social or economic changes, but occasionally some idiot manages to not blow himself up and becomes a twisted an...