The Gaming Den

GâtFromKI wrote:There was a need for a VtM sourcebook stating you can live in a motel or in a commercial building

I'm pretty sure it was White Wolf's need for cash flow that drove this book to production, rather than any perceived need for the book itself.

But the Traditions are actually making inroads in modern America with the Resurgence of the Religious Right. And they certainly aren't stopping there. You haven't lived until you've heard a college-educated person deride someone as "anti-science" and then without a smidgen of self-awarene...

Not while Gary Gygax was writing them. I want to say Against the Cult of the Reptile God was a pretty decent introductory adventure. I'd have to go and reread it to be totally sure, and my copy is packed up in anticipation of moving, but my recollection is that Cult of the Reptile God is a fine int...

Neither help by suggestion or inference nor hinder in any manner not called for (translation:assume your players are expert spelunkers, and fuck their characters for not being prepared if they aren't) I think that's a bit of a tendentious reading. It would be equally plausible to assume that "...

This makes me wonder why the authors of this just didn't write novels to have this stuff happen in and not an RPG, because it increasingly looks like they had no interest in the game side of things. Either that, or they are the same people who typically fail at logic. If they don't want other peopl...

So it's not as bad as I thought, it's worse. It's beyond idiotic that you pay money for a published adventure only for your character's actions to have no impact on what actually happens in the climax. I am being a little unkind. By no means all White Wolf's adventures were that bad. There were som...

Also, another quick question for ye olde sages of RPG history. i understand that in 1st edition the different lines did not really interact because they didn't know what was being made and what wasn't, but from what I understand, the same issue was there in later editions, so what reason was it the...

Actually, as someone who never read Rice, how close does WoD follow her work anyway? Because the vampires in-game are certainly nothing like Dracula and the other 'classic' vampires. Not very. Anne Rice doesn't have any clans, doesn't have any real concept of Generation beyond the vague notion that...

Maybe not fully on-topic, but after reading the OSSR for this, Vampire, Mage, Werewolf, Mummy, Promethean, Changeling, Black Hand, and numerous others, I have to ask, why was the fluff to this so popular? Not the crunch, which is generally awful, but is not the reason I've heard as to why people pl...

I admire the straightforwardness of having "Pimp Street" and "Whore Street" right there on the map. In a 1990s TSR product, no less! Can't say the word "demon", but whores are a-OK. Except why are they parallel? You'd think someone involved in the cartography would have...

While the lack of multiple actions is a close contender, I think maybe the best thing about the nMage 2 magic system is the complete absence of extended spellcasting rolls. For those of you who didn't pay much attention to nMage 1, among the dumb things it allowed you to do was to roll your casting ...

I actually played in a (short) campaign using these rules, among a group of gamers who were pretty much all old enough to have played AD&D unironically. Was it fun? I mean ... I guess kind of, but I ascribe this almost entirely to the players and very little to the rules. There's a lot of shit t...

Unlike Warhammer or OD&D, the Elric stories I've read all seem pretty SRS BSNESS. So even by the standards of the Bad Olde Days, it seems weird to take a setting known for a single badass dude with a badass sword and turn it into a game where starting characters have a not-insignificant chance ...

St. Andre has been generating a sample character as we go through this chapter, who is an Assassin but otherwise so uninteresting that I keep forgetting his name when I open the laptop. Merak Gren, the Assassin from ArgimilarfuckIdon'trememberhowtospellit? But yeah. Exactly that uninteresting. Has ...

Voss wrote: [And if you go way, way back, there are also some racist caricatures of Arabians, Pygmies and Japanese].

I need to go find my copy of Warhammer Armies and scan the Pygmy section, because I'm pretty sure the internet would actually explode if someone published this shit today.

So if there's already super magic police surveying every inch of the globe, secret services can catch up to you in no time, and every important muggle is under watch of some supernatural better than you, how exactly do you have Mage adventures? I'm assuming here that you mean Traditions Mage advent...

It's well beyond not being forced to get 4 dots of Protean. As a starting Vampire you can't have 4 dots in Protean. You only start with 3. Well, sort of. You get 3 dots of Disciplines, yeah, but you also get a pile of spendable XP at the end of the chargen process, and you can totally spend those p...

It would sort of fit in with the general theme of Werewolf for the division to not make sense. It's not like all the other things Werewolves do have much in the way of internal consistency or common sense; why should we expect their cosmology to hold together any better than their ideas on populatio...

There was a giant crayfish in "The Village of Hommlet." I've honestly lost track of how many gumbo jokes I've heard made about it.

This book is sort of the Scarred Lands in a nutshell: excellent production values, nice graphic design, and some clever ideas ultimately let down by an at least equal share of terrible ideas, plus the fact that no one on the design team seems to have had a clue how to actually play the game. I keep ...

Does MERP take any position on whether or not Balrogs have wings? I ask mostly because this was a question that consumed the more obsessive sectors of the Tolkien fanbase even in fucking 1991, which is approximately when I discovered that as Tolkien fandom goes I didn't even register on the obsessiv...

But does it shit on the lore less than Shadows of Mordor? Does it at least accomplish that? No. Jesus Christ, no. Fuck no. NO. Shadows of Mordor is to MERP as "some dude's Tolkien fanfic" is to this: https://d.justpo.st/media/images/2015/03/00a493fe03966c5a5c372308ab9b8a13.jpg You might b...

Also, their adaptations of the source material were frequently wtfomgbbq. This needs to be underlined. Then it needs to be hilited. Then it needs to be underlined a few more times, possibly in neon colors, and then with some exclamation points and question marks and whatever else you can think of t...

I'd rather see a discussion of rpgs that are mechanically shit and should have been better. I have a vague memory of the circa-2003? Star Trek RPG where starting characters generally couldn't regularly succeed on basic tasks. Dice pool system, and starting characters had 4-5 dice and target numbers...

I'm just curious what people think is the worst RPG. "What is the worst RPG in the world" and "what is the most morally repugnant game in the world" are not the same question and do not necessarily have the same answer. It wouldn't surprise me if they did in fact turn out to hav...