The Gaming Den

Not that 5e isn't terrible, but as far as it being a failure, Amazon disagrees. Two 5e books are in the top 30 of the best sellers list, and one of those is still a pre-order. That may not last, and none of us expect it to, but the truth is we can't objectively state that 5e is a financial failure ...

Not that 5e isn't terrible, but as far as it being a failure, Amazon disagrees. Two 5e books are in the top 30 of the best sellers list, and one of those is still a pre-order. That may not last, and none of us expect it to, but the truth is we can't objectively state that 5e is a financial failure w...

Wounds are numbered like Stamina, but come back slowly, maybe Hit Die+Con per day, plus Heal checks. I don't like this - natural healing should improve with your level, rather than being very effective at low level and agonizingly slow at high. Level+CON or level*2+CON might work better, or whateve...

Yeah, at some point, it's just a variation of the VP/WP system, except the WP are either on the same scale number-wise as the VP, or they can only be dealt one at a time. That way you have a buffer before you start accumulating consequences, but also some attrition between when consequences start ac...

What about reach weapons in a system that uses more abstract zones rather than 5ft squares? ... A couple people on this board have written about zone systems. Do reach weapons necessarily become cosmetic in them? Not at all. In my zone system, you use your move action to engage an opponent in melee...

I do believe that some amount of bounded accuracy is good, but not to he point where characters only see a 20% gain in efficacy over their entire careers. It is problematic when there is that much disparity between specialized characters and non-specialized characters in terms of skill rolls. That'...

Fire sure can inflict drowning; just combust out all the oxygen. I suppose if they were immune to fire and you wanted to kill them through suffocation, then yeah. And if "drowning" and "fire" are themselves just fluffy ways of describing damage (or forcing an endurance test, or ...

At least conceptually, there's nothing impossible about a Choose-Your-Own-Effect chart/charts and letting you flavor it with whatever power is on your character sheet. Preferably you keep those charts relatively all-inclusive, and have a backup way to determine the cost/difficulty of a novel effect ...

I wouldn't bother Sanderson about it personally. It's a near certainty he did none of the design work on the game, and if I got a chance to meet him at a convention I'd have a lot of other questions that he would be better able to answer (or at least get a RAFO card >_>) Yeah, IIRC, he didn't see t...

Yep. Bigger dice are generally better, and PP manipulation is where you can easily break the game.

MHR is roll and keep: you build your dicepool from 3-6 different sources, including anything from d4s to d12s, and roll. Then you pick 2 dice to add together to make your Accuracy, and from the remaining dice you pick 1 die to be your Effect, but you don't care about the Effect die's number, just it...

I'm with Schwarzkopf on fail forward. In addition to the sheer practical difficulty of combining meaningful successes and costs at the drop of a hat (i.e. on a per-check basis), it has a tendency to shift all weight off of PC choice and place it on stats. If costs are only associated with failure, r...

Isn't the point of a speculative experiment to find out how/where it stops working, take that feedback, and iterate? If people weren't supposed to run it through the shredder and find everything wrong with it, then it's not an experiment.

In my experience, specific hoops that you have to jump through often get roleplayed in a very perfunctory manner. E.g. "Hey buddy, can you resign from the team? Okay, thanks. Oh wait, I changed my mind you're back on the team. Ten XP please!" Lack of player buy-in isn't really a fault of ...

You can use some to buy temporary powers, and you can, IIRC, make those permanent by spending more at the end of the mission. There are other things, too, but I can't remember them off the top of my head.

I bought and played the Mistborn RPG and Josh is 100% correct; you don't know when anything will ever work, ever. There is no way to predict success or failure, period, you can't even begin to estimate what you are most likely to roll without insane calculations no lay person can do. The magic syste...

What it represents very well is a clownshoes mickey-mouse style comedy of errors in which people are spending only a fraction of their time doing the mission and the majority of it in trying to rescue themselves from the consequences of their own actions via digging themselves deeper into trouble. ...

I followed MHR (that's the recent one for those of you who can't seem to keep them apart) leading up to its release and bought a PDF shortly after. I've played in one game and ran another. At that point, I decided it wasn't for me, even though I liked many parts of it. What I liked- silva actually s...

Jenga creates tension, sure, but that's not the only element of the stealth genre, and the rest of the genre just isn't well modeled by a Jenga tower. The heist genre typically involves gathering information about the defenses you are likely to encounter, preparing tools/skills to circumvent them, a...

I've got a question, what's the best way to deal with exploring an actual dungeon with traps, treasure, monsters and so on? For a murderhobo dungeoncrawl hexgrid exploration kind of game. Do you have your players add stuff to grid paper? Do actual locations matter or is it kind of abstracted? I hav...

As codeGlaze's signature predicts, their goals would both be better served and maintain the nostalgia for using d20 by simply extending their advantage/disadvantage mechanic. Instead of adding more to your single d20 roll, roll a bunch of d20s and take the highest. Add your Ability score and you're ...

ishy wrote: I don't care about the baseline as long as I can do what I intend to do.

And I think that view is shared by the majority of gamers. I don't think this whole resentment thing really happens often at all, but apparently Lago does.

There might be a fundamental flaw with the idea that complex classes and basic classes should be used together at the same table. If that was not the case, we would not have the resentment problem, theoretically. Edit: And I guess the question of the day would then be, would it still be worth it to ...

Okay, so now I as the game designer say that if you jump into the game without reading the classes carefully you can play these easier classes but they'll be weaker than the expert classes. Now nothing is being misrepresented and Timmy is fully warned. Is he still justified in his resentment more t...

Look, I'm just saying that the reply of 'just ignore those feelings of resentment you selfish man' is not only unconvincing but hypocritical. Hell, I could flip the question onto you: why doesn't Timmy swallow his resentment and pride and accept it as the cost of not knowing the rules? And that's r...