The Gaming Den

"Able to be beaten" and "is competitive" are two different things. Competition requires multiple actors comparing results and determining who "did better". Games don't require beating for competition. Beatability requires setting up a win condition ahead of time (whethe...

Which do you think tells better stories, or is more fun? Depends entirely on who you are gaming with. Or, equivalently, who you want to play your game, who your market is, et cetera. I'm going to guess you are mostly making this game so you can play it with other people. Thus, the important questio...

Yeah, I also agree entirely. It just needs to seem crime-y enough, sound technical enough, and it should be entertaining.

Mistborn, I think you're reading too much into this. DnD (none of the editions) is not some magnum opus of philosophy. It's just one game, made by some people. They didn't put as much thought into it as you have. Doesn't mean it couldn't or should not have been done better, but... I guess my entire ...

I don't think any actual expert will accuse police and courtroom shows of being knowledge porn. That's like calling Star Trek science porn. The forensics and law that we see in those things makes about as much sense as reversing the polarity of the neutron field. It's bullshit designed to look and ...

This just took a turn for the interesting. I'll try to sum up what you said Ice9. Feel free to correct me or add on. So anything that requires an property of reality to work - such as a predetermined future - can't work in a fictional game where that property doesn't exist (because of dice and playe...

There are significant differences between "below the average human" and "average human" and "peak human". When we say "below average human", we mean... a sentient mouse. Or a child. We when say "peak human" we really mean peak human. Astronaut, body ...

I'd say one thing that I have yet to see an RPG do very successfully is a police procedural. Not sure if it can't be done, since RPG is a very elastic term, which includes many things beyond strictly playing a certain role. Now that I think about it, that kind of game sounds awesome. But there are ...

You could possibly run a body guard game where players get to plan... but the end result is that something interesting always happens any way. Perhaps the reward for filtering out all the low-level threats is that only the high level threats get through. So let's say you made sure the crazy ex girlf...

How about this for discussing tiers? I doubt people will adopt any new tier vocabulary. People barely adopted JaronK's configuration and that's the most popular one by far. So we can't invent new meanings for "Tier 2" and expect people to understand what they mean. But that's solvable. The...

double post

So in my regards, assuming there is a system in place, as I recall, RPG's apparently can't handle Star Trek/FTL:Faster-Than-Light, Political game ela Game of Thrones, and perhaps even Dynasty Warrior style mass battle campaigns (Well D&D kinda does it, but I also mean Mass Battles in general,ho...

Ancient History wrote:Non-linear storytelling in general is difficult for RPGs. Not impossible, but difficult.

Can you describe what a non linear story is, and perhaps what form it would take as an RPG?

There is no such thing as "an actual threat" in fucking fiction . It's all unreality. Stories can be better or worse at maintaining illusory threats to their unreal characters, but this fucking nonsense about actual real threats has to stop. Yeah, you are being unhelpful. That same logic ...

No, it just changes the tension from "Will our hero survive this deadly encounter?" to "How will our hero survive this deadly encounter?" That's how a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark can be thrilling even if you know in advance that Indiana Jones can't die because he has to g...

So passive forms don't really work for the interactive medium.

For a game to deliver characters surviving deadly scenarios, the scenarios themselves have to be "not actually deadly", which rather defeats the point. No, it just changes the tension from "Will our hero survive this deadly encounter?" to "How will our hero survive this dea...

The question: What characters or stories are impossible to produce in RPGs because of the characteristics of the medium What you probably meant was this: "What characters or stories are impossible to produce in RPGS without the game becoming un-fun because of the characteristics of the medium&...

I think Saints Row would translate to table top RPGs very poorly. Saints Row relies on visual spectacle and gag humor. Much of the fun is doing something and watching all the insanity unfold. And the things Saints Row describes are interesting visually, but not interesting from a text or speech base...

Thanks for the laugh. But no, I have not made a program that skims this forum for strong claims.

I just make a lot of analogies between programming and human thought.

Tomorrow I'm playing a 13th level game that is at an absurdly high power level. My character is an Initiative of Mystra abusing, persistent divine metamagiking Archivist who thanks to Monstrous Regeneration and Favor of Ilmater is literally immune to HP damage. And tomorrow when I fight some Demon ...

... The Vanilla Action Hero is the character of choice of innumerates who do not understand probability. And what they want out of the character type is literally impossible. What they want is a character who "beats the odds", which is literally and specifically the only character that no...

...Dave is a hardworking, honest and decent guy, entirely underserving of your rather unpleasant accusations.... This was actually fairly entertaining in a bit of a depressive way. I'd like you to take your blatant advertising else where (preferably no where). I guess it's nice to know there are pe...

Is the class actually going to be just a fighting class? If so, I don't quite understand avoiding calling the class what it is; the fighting class. Worrying about transparency rather than substance seems inconsistent. If the class is not just a fighting class, then call it what it is. So the questio...

I'll weigh in. I use a computer and the internet very heavily when I build characters. I have a text document detailing the exact plan and inexact plan of every character I play (probably 4-5 pages each for completed characters). I also keep the text documents of every character I have ever played o...