The Gaming Den

The exact siege-engine spam issue was discovered and discussed outside of the game and a gentleman's agreement was made that if you play the traitor you have to try and slip under the radar for as long victory by stealth is possible (an unrevealed traitor flips one or two (I forget) of those victor...

How does Shadows over Camelot compare to the Battlestar Galactica boardgame? Because I have enjoyed BSG quite a bit. In Camelot, whether you have a traitor or not is determined randomly, so the difficulty for the good guys varies dramatically based on the draw of one card . It also varies a lot bas...

It doesn't help that past chargen, you can only buy up attributes one point at a time by filling out most of a talent tree. So if you fail to spend your points on attributes at the start, you're just permanently hosed.

The biggest problem with d6 Star Wars is that the skill list is bullshit long and in half the books, they added more. So you can think that you are shit-hot at modifying droids, and then your GM picks up the droid book and says, "Ah, well, you only have droid programming and droid repair, and w...

I also really dislike the recent grimdarkifying of the Tau. No, no, please don't make them the mind-controlled slaves of the Ethereal caste with death camps galore. There needs to be at least one faction that shows that the Imperium could be better. That yes, if their leaders weren't terrible, they ...

To reinforce Frank's essay, I might point out that even Dan Abnett's Mary Sue Ravenor states that it's impossible to stay committed to the ideals of the Imperium and effectively serve the Imperium. He flat out states in Eisenhorn that it's inevitable that any Inquisitor who lives long enough is goi...

AFAICT, the SNP's position was "we keep everything we like, and nothing we don't." Which is interesting, since they had no fucking leverage. "We're going to keep the pound and oh, BTW, our power in the Bank of England." Uh, sure. What if the referendum had passed and the UK had t...

Images of people pushing wheelbarrows full of money and five billion mark postage stamps are very evocative. I think this is a big part of it. What little history people know is largely made up of stories that make sense to their preconceptions. I also think that austerity fits the narrative better...

Was it this thing ? If so, that's a (nonfunctional!) Scud launcher previously owned by the Military Vehicle Technology Foundation, one of the largest private collections of the kind. The owner died a few years ago, and the collection was signed over to a foundation in Massachussets last year, while ...

If you haven't read Lord of Light, do so. And the Chronicles of Amber. Because Zelazny is aweseome. As far as high fantasy series, I'd recommend Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and the Coldfire series (both trilogies, more or less). Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry is his closest to standard high fanta...

I'm not very business savvy so excuse me if this comes off as a retarded question but "why did they bother?" Is there some kind of money to be made by changing the dress code that worked fine with no problems to include an entire outfit? Decisions aren't made by "the business", ...

5e seems to have skills kind of licked. Everyone has all skills where you can always roll a check and get the appropriate stat mod to that check regardless of what character you use, but characters with proficiency get a +2 to +6 to that check. This means that the different between a fighter with a...

Plus, if oil prices were the cause of the collapse, that would mean that the mortgages, the CDOs based on them, the CDSes sold on the CDOs, and the synthetic CDOs based on the CDSes were all good ideas until the price of oil went up. That's fucking nuts. Those investments weren't even risky, they we...

Umm...what? The banks' death had zero do to with peak oil. It had everything to do with the deregulating of the financial industry and the subsequent creation of the synthetic collateralized debt obligation, which took bullshit mortgages, ran them through the same kind of machine that turns pig ass...

tussock wrote:Taiwan and the Phillipines were then liberated from China by the US, which I'm sure.was a complete coincidence.

What. The PRC was never in control of Taiwan, much less the Philippines.

Guderian wrote in his postwar book Panzer Leader that it was pretty clear from 1941 onwards that the invasion of the Soviet Union was doomed and that Germany would not win the war. The thing he rated as most important was the Soviet ability to produce immense numbers of tanks very cheaply and pour ...

Ironically, the word "soccer" is derived from Association, but the Brits decided that it was too American of a word and switched back to football. Which is strange, because to me it sounds like a profoundly upper-class British word. Which, of course, it is. Like "rugger" for rug...

Fascinating review. One question, the map of the Theran Empire...what is up with the Nile? It must be a river of glass shards and death, because it looks like the Empire deliberately conquered the shitty land west of the Nile for 2500km into the middle of Africa instead of, like, one of the most pri...

Okay, so it's been stated that droids are awesome. I don't see it. They start with all stats at 1, 175xp, and three free skills. Humans start with all stats at 2, 110xp, and two free skills. But stats cost 10 times the new rating to raise, so to get a droid's stats to a human's stats costs 20xp for ...

kevlar without trauma plates is like cutting through heavy, tough cloth. You can stab through it easily. Yeah, but people who wear kevlar vests are more concerned about the danger from bullets than knives. In, say, the UK, where beat cops are more likely to get stabbed than shot, they wear stab ves...

The fun thing is, Germans all seem to believe that they did 1) after reunification, when actually Europe did them a solid and let them do 2). Now when Europe needs them to help out in exactly the way they were helped out, suddenly it's fiscally irresponsible, and the profligate southerners must pay....

The worst case is not "the economy recovers". Krugman pointed out that Japan's "lost decade" (now two decades +) averaged significantly higher growth than Europe's having now. The Eurozone is sliding into deflation, which is extremely difficult to get out of, under the wise guida...

The level of cognitive dissonance amongst libertarian/anarchist lawyers blows my fucking mind every fucking day. Yeah, I also love the argument that companies won't dump poison into the water/food/children's toys because they'll be sued. Even granting that there's magically still a court system bac...

And that dumbass doesn't realize that if the state isn't involved in any business transactions, all contracts go fucking poof. You can't hire someone to build a house, because either of you can freely stiff the other. Not only aren't there any cops, there aren't even any lawsuits. Why would you comp...

It really just seems like FFG thought that a whole pile of fiddly bullshit was just what their RPG needed.