The Gaming Den

Being super aggressive at everyone isn't very conductive to actually discussing things though, pretty much the other side of the coin when it comes to passive-aggressiveness.

About narrative authority and players, I think one of my favorite rules anywhere ever is the Instinct rule that's in Burning Wheel: basically, a player can define an automatic reaction that the character has in a situation, which overwrites normal rules considerations. For instance, a character can ...

Tall order much? First, there are a lot of posters on this forum and they don't agree on everything, but the most fundamental conceit of the den hivemind is that mechanics matter . Let's go with an example. If you want to make a superhero game then the mechanics must support the genre conventions o...

No, but it was the premise of your question. f I think I mentioned four different games that have threads on the front page of the subforum, all of which have been elsewhere been rather well-received, or well received when published. Granted, Orpheus is probably the most obscure one but back when i...

That wasn't the question though.

Looking at the threads on this forum, it seems that the opinions about most games are overwhelmingly negative, even about games that elsewhere get a good reception (Apocalypse World, Unknown Armies, Orpheus, Pathfinder) so I thought to ask you Den posters, what makes for a good game? What sort of ru...

Unless you just paraphrased it poorly and it's better worded, doesn't this literally say that Entropomancers can't get charges by endangering themselves in pursuit of the goal of getting charges to use to accomplish a goal? Limiting it to 'needlessly' makes it impossible to get charges on purpose, ...

Because obviously, that's what's you like in this game: you can use it to play CoC instead of an X-man. Err... No. You can't pretend the rules are simple if you have to use the kindergarden's rules for your friends. You can't pretend to "initiate" your friend to this game if they're playi...

Well, I can teach someone the basic rules on the fly no problem, but the magic rules add quite a bit more stuff to read and to understand before you can use them. My group's got an Entropomancer (one of those guys that gets to do stuff with random chances), a mundane pro burglar and a mundane grad s...

If there is a problem with Unknown Armies, in my opinion, is its unfocused nature. Its like its trying to be 3 games at the same time - the game of the clueless mundanes who stumble with the unnatural and try to deal with it; the game of obsessive adepts in crazy quests for power (and ruin); the ga...

Not only is Unknown Armies very obviously someone's set of Call of Cthulhu house rules, it isn't even Stolze's. It's Tynes' set of Call of Cthulhu house rules. You know, the guy who writes Call of Cthulhu supplements for a living and very obviously has a set of house rules for Call of Cthulhu that ...

I don't get this line of thought at all. How do you get no personal experience out of the claim "I recognize these rules and they were shit the first time"? Do you mean that UA isn't based on/related to CoC? It's closer related to Over The Edge for many parts and it's kind of the prototyp...

I am certain that there isn't a single independently unique component in Unknown Armies, and that every piece of the system has been personally experienced at one point or another between Frank & Ancient History in some other system. Considering the fact that Frank Trollman wants to call the ru...

Sorry about the quotes tags thing, had no idea what's causing the posts to appear weird like that.

So your argument is that recipes/rules are irrelevant because a good chef/MC can make something palatable out of a shit recipe/system and an awful chef/MC can make a disaster out of even a good recipe/system? The recipes matter, but the skill of the chef is always the central issue. I'd see it more...

You might say that Batman's player is a total munchkin for having that skill, and maybe he is. That's kind of the issue with freeform skills, though: how do we get everyone on the same page ? There's an actual official Unknown Armies NPC who has a skill in "Killing Things Up Close". Is th...

"Assumptions" are entirely toothless for invoking during play. If the only thing that could save New York City is Larry the TV Repairman, suddenly Larry is relying on a coinflip to do his damn job without transforming into an incompetent boob, because suddenly there's "stakes". ...

Please explain because - and maybe this is because I haven't ordered a tuna steak at a restaurant - I have no clue what you're trying to say there. Well, how the tuna turns out is most of all reliant of the skill of the chef. A chef could follow a recipe and still the tuna would turn out tasting li...

GâtFromKI wrote: Does a deadline count as a "meaningful time limit"?

That's where the Fuzzy Logic parts come in, if it's ain't a big deal to fail at a routine task, no roll necessary.

Ancient History wrote:Ye gods and hairy fishes, this is like Zak S again.

I don't harass people online though.

There's also the assumption in UA that since you only roll when you're actually challenged, you go day to day without making a single roll. A TV repairman knows how to open up a TV and check if a doohickey is busted and knows how to replace, I know how to do a background check of someone. These aren...

I dunno. I think if you have both the recipes and the menu it ends up approaching a reasonable simile. I mean, you have to assume the chef follows the recipe, and you'll have defenders going "No! This restaurant isn't shit! Yeah, I know the recipe for the pineapple pizza has only one ingredien...

Or maybe the rules explain clearly when your Badassitude 25% gives you an auto-success and when you have to roll? Yes, in fact. If there's no current threat to the PC, no meaningful time limit, no significant penalty for failure, specialization is not an issue and no drama regardless of success or ...

This isn't nearly as valid a simile as you think it is. Reviewing an RPG you haven't played is more like debugging a program without first running the program - which you can totally do, if the program is simple enough and the bugs self-contained within the program. RPG's are a lot more complex tha...

GâtFromKI wrote: this is not something the system itself does; this is something you have to add to the system to make it work.

Says so on page 280, so you don't have to add that yourself.