The Gaming Den

Sleeping to me feels like dying, and giving birth to a new being. Who guarantees the ego when I wake up is really me? Just because I think I'm me, and everyone I interact with recognizes me and acts as though it's me, doesn't mean it's REALLY me. For what does it even mean to really BE someone???????

Why would anyone try to turn TTRPG designers into AAA video game developers?

It's hard to see how massive fiddling with how people allocate skill ranks is going to have any big mechanical ramifications, especially if you keep them capped at their level. After all, the number of skill ranks was never the source of ridiculously vast skill checks or huge discrepancies between c...

The last couple chapters are also pretty good. You get some interesting tactical challenges. But, yes, the specific way they extend the duration of the game is really lunkheaded.

I wouldn't necessarily have it be as simple as (0-3) * character level. You'd have to carefully check the skill rank progression and the DC progression and decide, for instance, how far you want the "I'd like to be decent" and "I'd like to be oustanding" characters to diverge, or...

It seems like you don't really need that much more granularity in your skill system than a few stages, like "I don't care about this at all", "I don't care about this but maybe it'll come up", "I'd like to be pretty decent at this", "I'd like to be outstanding at t...

Frank Trollman wrote:Scrying pools are pretty amazing if you can photograph the stuff you're looking at and almost worthless if you can't.

Can you give me the reasoning behind this? It sounds interesting, I'd like to read the thoughts that went into this dichotomy.

Hopefully he keeps using even more awesome sources. After the Wikipedia article on the grandmother hypothesis and the dictionary definition of "democracy", I hope we start getting declarations about the nature of good taken from greeting cards.

Is this some new version of "democratic" where anything that isn't currently being subjected to violent revolution is "democratic"?

Thanks for explaining the use of square brackets! What a shocking new convention.

Yeah, my understanding is that comics themselves are not actually that big, and even Marvel and DC are much contracted compared to where they were twenty or fifty years ago. But Marvel and DC adaptations into TV shows and movies are wildly more successful.

I played Titanfall for a couple weeks when it first came out, and also a ton during the beta. It was incredibly fun, but I haven't gone back to it much. It's a billion times more fun with other people, and at least one of the people I played the beta with never picked up the full game. And also I'm ...

Bad Boys was pretty fun when it was Smith and Lawrence bouncing off each other or stuff exploding, but the actual plot with the mistaken-identity impersonation stuff dragged it down. A bunch of complexity to little effect.

It seems a little weird to criticize Michael Bay for having too much product placement and for being insufficiently toyetic. I mean, I guess if you really like robot figurines and really don't like Vaios or GM SUVs or something, it makes sense, it just strikes me as weird.

Frank has a couple posts on the matter starting here.

Who seriously has a deeply-held passionate commitment to the integrity of the fucking lore of Ninja Turtles and Transformers? Michael Bay rules.

Only War , Fantasy Flight's Dark Heresy spinoff focusing on playing as a squad of Imperial Guardsmen, has Heavy Gunner, Medic, Operator (as in vehicles), Sergeant, and Weapons Specialist as its classes. There are also Support Specialists, "elite members of the Imperial Guard who possess advanc...

If there's a game where the entirety of its mechanical guts consists of "[Fill this blank at the table]" and you end up getting an awesome GM who comes up with cool stuff to fill it with, you'll have a good time.

Wait, so if he has a 15% chance to Lie Badly, and he fails the roll, does he lie well? Or tell the truth? Or what?

So you're actually wandering through a really boring city, and then you stumble upon NPCs glitching out and shouting weird things and performing cryptic symbolic stuff. And you sort of nod sagely and go "Mmm yes change, how deep" and wander elsewhere.

That sounds like a whole lot of wandering around through bizarre dreamscapes full of mystified significance that make sense to at most one person at the table, gazing at some weird occurrence and doing nothing, and then... just a lot of observing and doing nothing.

Holy shit how ~evocative~.

I mean, AW takes way more flak for "quantum bears" than Shadowrun does for having a bunch of slow bad rules, like never having a version of the Matrix that actually worked (and this is after 5 editions!). Shadowrun has taken a shitload of flak on the Den for having terrible Matrix rules. ...

Silva thinks that if the game has a ton of mechanics about "hard choices" or "mental dysfunction", then they all support whatever themes about "hard choices" or "mental dysfunction" the author was going for. It doesn't matter what the actual content of the rul...

Silva you yourself used the term "mythopoaeic" earlier in this thread. Are you saying that you Googled it way earlier?

Let's see if silva says, yet again, that AW isn't supposed to be an engine for resolving tasks, but for, uh, something else that's different.