The Gaming Den

In my group, no one has bought any of the new product besides the RC (which looks somewhat useful for what it is). Red Box getting into Walmart is some kind of victory, I guess, but I haven't checked on whether it's moving (it's taking up a small section of the CCG shelves). People that already had ...

I'd say it's an unstated goal with these games that not only do you want to give people a large "toolbox" so they can build a large variety of characters/types, but you actually want everyone at the table playing different stuff. You can rely somewhat on different people's notions of cool ...

Not directly related to the DMF issue but responding to side points above: a) "Forced diversity" (e.g. forcing someone to play the cleric) isn't entirely bad, if it leads to more interesting parties and/or prevents stupid-party-build tricks (4 fighters + 1 warlord in 4e and such). b) Certa...

What's BECMI? The Frank Mentzer rewrite/expansion of "Basic D&D" that ended up as five boxed sets. (Essentials uses the same art/design for their red box as Mentzer Basic.) Each box covered a specific level range (1-3/4-14/15-25/26-36/godhood) and the theme of each "tier" wa...

Is this a rehash? To some extent it's BECMI without the I (your character didn't exactly "transcend" its previous-tier stats, but they'd add rules based on what your character was supposed to be doing in the new tier, primarily warfare-sim and dominion-sim stuff in Companion and quest-for...

Are "Aladdin"-style stories something you want to support at high level, and if so would you also consider him a gadgeteer (he wins the game via wish magic, but arguably the point of the story is that even regular guys that are crafty enough should be able to defeat wizards and such)?

Balancing the game around the RNG + assuming that everyone has level-appropriate "plus weapons" as part of the progression = lame, because it forces the whole "expected treasure vouchers" mindset. Either change the balance to something other than "PCs hit 55% of the time, +/...

It's not a question of clunky/outdated vs fresh/elegant/whatever mechanics; it's whether the thing being represented can be called "war" in any traditional sense (there's no killing folks and blowing shit up). I don't actually like TS as a game, but that's not my argument here; I'm saying ...

Twilight Struggle is their #1 wargame, which is quite bizarre.

If the game is all about "buying effects", then stuff which has a clear combat effect (e.g. damage negation) is probably going to get separated out from more fuzzily defined items. (I don't remember whether Acro gives you any special movement options or is just typical stuff like grapple e...

My experience with using Hero 5th for a fantasy game was negative. I think the combat system was OK (d20-ish with 3d6 randomizer etc. mentioned above), but their point-based char-gen system applied to fantasy is kind of terrible. The game makes the assumption that all characters from all genres can ...

But "letters to Santa" is exactly how you're supposed to be distributing loot anyway (e.g. I've been running a campaign for a year, and the only randomization has been who gets what level item slot out of the parcels for each level out of the DMG). I'm not commenting on the (lack of) veris...

Individual D&D trash fights take as long to resolve as entire WoW instances. If I'm a hypothetical gamer coming over from WoW to 4e, what am I supposed to be getting in return for giving up on anything resembling a real-time, exciting combat?

I came here for the "journalism", i.e. I got involved with an Eclipse Phase one-shot, remembered that I'd heard something about Catalyst going bankrupt due to fraud, and followed the Google trail here.

The only way it counts as not involving rules changes to 4e is that they are issuing errata to 4e books to bring them in line with Essentials. The word "essentials" is actually pretty weird, my guess is that it was chosen to confuse the matter over people saying "4E" (4th editio...

While I'm here, the product catalog on the WotC site now extends into the first three months of 2011. They added that Heroes of Shadow thing (Mar 11) within the past few days. (That would be the first release after Aug 10 that doesn't have the Essentials tag, although there's other weirdness afoot,...

Does anyone anywhere have any direct evidence of there being any second printing PHB1s for 4th edition? There was the "there was so much pre-order demand that we had to do a 2nd run on the initial printing" announcement (May 08); and there was also the Deluxe/foil-back/hologram/whatever P...

Most recent WOTC podcast: Essentials is intended to be the new "evergreen" product (whatever the hell that means, given present-day life expectancy of RPG lines); and all the class variant material in Essentials is supposed to be fully "swappable" with stuff in the current books ...

(link to confirm this? can't find anything)

For example, one main complaint seems to be that 4th ed is just boring. But the game still has all the status conditions a 3rd ed wizard could cause (blinded, deafened, etc.). Anybody tried to emphasize on this, by giving them higher durations or something? (And I don't mean singular builds like th...

But after playing more, I started noticing more and more the mentioned problems. Combat takes FOREVER. It's very tactical in my opinion, but also very samey. The HP of monsters is just way too high, and the damage they do seems way too low. (...) But, I can't really think of many ways they could ch...