The Gaming Den

I'll be honest, it took me a couple months of reading this board before I learned that "Frank Trollman" wasn't just a straight-forward alias for a guy who enjoyed blunt honesty and pushing people's buttons. For that type of person it would make a good alias. And I would probably be posting...

And lots of em! I particularly liked "Die Young" as a country song.

I still don't get why people like Wheel of Time and Song of Fire and Ice. They're both just not that enjoyable to read. [Reasons]... often, attempting to explain why you like something to someone who doesn't is a waste of time, but I thought I'd give it a shot. Sabs, you should waste your time too....

It takes only moments for a Tome re-write to become an overly ambitious doomed-to-fail attempt to fix all of a dozen people's mutually incompatible pet D&D peeves. If you want to write your own D&D heartbreaker based on the Tomes, go for it. But please don't call it a Tome update. That just...

Thought 1: If you're going to use an acronym that isn't as basic and common as GM or XP then you need to spell the thing out first. I'd rather chastise you for being a lazy jerk than look up MHRP, though I think you meant WHRP anyway. Thought 2: The game session seems like the best way to determine ...

I still have no earthly idea what the Elf Cup is, other than something you don't want to be, but this story was great. These elves are interesting, as opposed to others I've read about.

I have to agree that his Latro books are incredible, probably his best work that I've read (much more accessible than the New Sun books, and Latro is a much more sympathetic protagonist than Severian). Yes, though I rather liked that Severian was a bit of a tool and certainly didn't deserve his pla...

I recently read John Scalzi's "Old Man's War" series, specifically: Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, The Last Colony, and Zoe's Tale. The first book was good enough to keep with the series. If you like stories of really sexy septuagenarians having orgies, cool believable future tech, lot...

you can have sneaky wizards in 2nd, as i mentioned, just they dont use some "sneak" skill, because everyone doesnt need this exact skill created for the pointless thief class. how many people have claimed that a thief is useless or their thief character was outdone by a wizard? well that ...

In this photo I am sober.

I came to the Den because RobbyPants told me an ability on his or another person's fighter came from the Tome fighter and I shouldn't be so ignorant.

I always pictured Frank as a very impatient-looking young Eugene Levy.

I'll be at PAX in a couple of days. It would be fun if I could meet some Denners, maybe go troll the D&DNext presentation.

Aside from getting charop benefits from certain combinations, I see lots of reasons why someone would want to multiclass. Maybe your character lived life as a barbarian for a time, then in his years in a city and as a pirate he was a rogue, then he joined a band of marauders and mercenaries and beca...

JE's method is hard for lots of people to swallow Maybe because it's basically no different than building a game in which every level has a huge list of crap from which you have to select your class ability. Seriously, there's no reason for classes at all in that setup. There's 2 basic multiclass s...

One particular definition I like for "base class" is identity . Your character's identity as a person is defined by the dominant base class, and other classes or PrCs add flavor to this. A wizard self-identifies as a wizard, even if he's also a mystic theurge and a true necromancer. As suc...

20 GM Guidelines that have proven to be extremely effective in keeping a game fun. I'm not sure I like the cut scenes point (both in that I don't think this is the right medium for that and there are abilities in-game that do that), but I like most of the rest. I particularly like his willingness a...

20 GM Guidelines that have proven to be extremely effective in keeping a game fun.

Here's what I've been thinking about, we should be aiming to produce three separate documents. Complete Tome : A document in the style of the OGL SRD. Should contain only 'core' items. The Community Codex : Exactly what it sounds like. A collection of classes, feats, items and whatever from this fo...

Let me try to be constructive, calling people "wrong" seems needlessly inflammatory. Stating you think someone is wrong isn't particularly inflammatory, it might even be the nicest thing any one has said to me on the Den. I was hoping my comment would be read as tongue-in-cheek, but that ...

Seems like the agreed-upon element that aught to be included in a GM's guide is "quarterbacking is bad, here are methods to make it stop."

3. How close to Arkham Horror do I want this to be? Is the reaction more likely to be 'this is a rip-off by a jerk,' or 'I enjoy this thing that's a lot like the other thing I enjoy?' If you haven't already done this before, make the AH you want to play. Test it, tweak it, and then scrap it. Now st...

I think it would be acceptable, for a Tome variant of D&D, to expect all players to have either a moderate level of system proficiency or to be at least moderately dedicated to gaining said mastery. Let's face it, the Tome is only ever likely to be played by people who are already into this sor...

What is this entire exercise attempting to accomplish? What is the design goal?

What needs to happen is to have them be more clearly labeled as to what is what. To a beginning player it's not nearly so obvious that the Sorcerer is an "experts only" class while the Cleric is the "anyone can do this" class. These are the kinds of things that should have an OO...

Man, all of this seems like it can just be replaced easily by "Everyone has 10 hitpoints, Roll a d20 vs defense, margin of success determines damage" I like that line of thinking too. Well that simplifies, but simplicity isn't necessarily a good thing. If Simple Uber Alles then go play Mi...