The Gaming Den

If you use their published mods (IM1-3) as a guide to what the game was supposed to be like, they were going for a combination of save-the-world scenarios and PVP (with maybe some dominion-sim/world-building mixed in although I don't remember the rules support being all that detailed). So similar to...

Heinsoo (along with Robin Laws) made Feng Shui. He has my respect as a designer and a human being. ...But, but: google the phrase "potentially slightly tedious", then come nerdrage walk with me? (both at the absurd delicacy of the line itself, as well as the general content of the intervi...

Although actually the worst part of that is this: I hasted the party (+1 to weapon attacks, +1 AC, +5ft move, and I can give up my standard action any turn to grant a move or standard to anyone else effected), and then I used Invisibility. I spent the whole fight just giving the hafling more attack...

Anyone want to guess how they're going to interpret/implement the 77% "story-based" leaning on that last poll?

If "90s Bruce" still exists and is just hiding/sleeping in some dusty corner of his brain, then yes. (I'd forgotten about the 4e ranger incident; harder to see why he got promoted then unless WOTC is giving him the same sort of "RttToH was cool" credit that I am.)

Bruce Cordell has lost it. Completely. He shouldn't be at the helm of D&D, and anything he's going to produce is going to be god damn awful. When I posted that list of "good stuff" he's done in the (distant?) past, I was going to add that perhaps he's been on a downward trajectory (e....

This is a short "decent fantasy ideas" list just from the mods I was thinking of: Return to ToH: the City of Moil backstory/setting; the Fortress of Conclusion as a bad-guy base to a lesser extent; in general the relatively seamless/consistent way it extended the Gygaxian-dickery concept o...

I think Cordell has written decent mods (some of the "Return" adventures like ToH, WPM, also some of the little psionicy stuff for Malhavoc). The category I wanted to put him into was "guy who has pretty good 'fantasy ideas' and who can translate them into system mechanics in a passab...

Is there any recent evidence of where the design trinity's heads are at? Apparently Schwalb has sole author credit on Song of Fire and Ice RPG; has anyone read/played that? Has Cook done anything more recent for 3e besides the DungeonADay thing? (Cordell has been doing 4e of course...) I guess what ...

Weird gamer guy in my area had a huge "universal conversion document" he used whenever he ran D&D. The premise was supposed to be that you could make your character using any edition, any source, and that running it through this rules set would somehow normalize everything and lead to ...

The point is whether doing stuff like OGL, pdf's linked to/separate from physical etc. still requires you to have a robust hardback-fetishist market. They can still sell physical to people that are cuckoo enough to want to replicate their 1/2/3e shelf-space-wasters with every new edition (see 4e), b...

So Mike Mearls is the Tom Friedman of D&D writers, is what you are saying?

(I heard the somewhat-obsessive-but-not-terrible "5-man 4e party = basketball team" analogy on the podcast, but didn't know/realize he ever veered into uber-steroid-flattener-cake territory.)

In that vein, as to Frank Trollman's specific observation that skill challenges are the Ghandi of game mechanics, I can only agree. I vaguely remember seeing this conversation quoted before, but I don't know if I ever figured out whether the phrase "Gandhi of game mechanics" actually mean...

You're making my point: it is not "PC's" versus "DM," because the DM is arbitrarily tying his hands behind his back to lower his chances of winning. So when you say things like "murderball versus the DM ," you're just flat-out wrong. There is no versus the DM, at all, ...

Combat is "played the most" because D&D players are there to play a wargame. They want to engage with a complicated wargame-like RPG, and the developers provide said system. Nope. Combat is 'played the most' because thats the part you need rules for. You don't need 3.x/4.x rules-bible...

1) Suppose D&D is murderball versus the DM. 2) There are opponents you cannot beat. 3) The DM decides the opponents you face. 4) You will always face opponents you cannot beat. The CR/EL mechanics (as flawed as they are) are supposed to provide some kind of objective gauge for difficulty. The D...

If D&D isn't essentially "Murderball versus the DM", then why the wargame-like clusterfuck complexity that is the 3.x (or 4.x) combat system with all the bells and whistles? Why are people suggesting that D&D is anything but a wargame-heavy story-lite kinda-sorta-RPG? If you want u...

Kind of a side note but I think I recall that the Robin Laws version of Runequest used a "higher skill tiers = multiples of 20 but we're hiding it" strategy. (never played the game but pretty sure it's roll-under-skill-rating on a d20, and if you trained your rating to 21, it cycled back t...

It appears in the original AD&D Monster Manual ...That's pretty badass. (It's that old-school but it's probably the only 1e MM creature that I've never seen used or referenced outside of this conversation; actually I just looked through the index again, and the only other creature in that WTF c...

What book/source was Windwalker in? Also, WTF?

Personal preferences as I think of them: Less "oppressive governments"/more "societal collapse" works better for me. There was some fabulous dark humor in the early books (people accepting the fact that planes/buildings got blown up on a regular basis etc.) that got phased out wh...

To point out the irony of your post (excuse me if you were already aware of it), Ron Edwards, Patriarch of the Forge, afaik invented the GNS terms you're using to characterize the games there. Yes; what I was saying was that if these other writers are deep enough in the Forge gravity well to frame ...

So I looked at Apocalypse World on its forum. It seems like pure Magic Tea Party added to character sheets. Are we calling those games now? I mean, it seems more like an improvisational theater set-up that sometimes uses dice. Is there anyone else on the Forge who might have a contender for an actu...

I might have missed a few system-related bitchfests in the past few months, but another recent roll-under system was Eclipse Phase, and I'm pretty sure this same conversation came up in that thread (i.e. the fact that in addition to roll-under somewhat sucking, the opposed-test mechanic is "rol...

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Wait, rope trick's in 4e? Where?

lv 12 ritual MoP; earlier/more common version was Exodus Knife (lv 12 wond item AV1)