The Gaming Den

It's a cool idea, but being able to swap yourself out for a monster that could be (and quite possibly was) a difficult boss fight for your entire party, even for a few rounds, seems incredibly strong.

I'm pretty sure most young gamers get the bright idea of writing their own RPG system at some point. And hopefully, sooner or later we get a solid enough grasp on the math to understand why the ideas we had when we were 15 were bad. But the guy making this crap is supposedly an experienced writer wh...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/563681582/fast-core-rulebook-multi-genre-rpg-system/description To be honest, I'm normally a sucker for RPG Kickstarters that seem even mildly interesting, if the price is right. But what a mess this is: - rolling d100 three times for attributes is going to make ...

I'm pretty sure you're right and it was the Miniatures Handbook. Of course, "swift action" is essentially a formal term for the type of action that casting a quickened spell always was anyway. The Miniatures Handbook just gave the mechanic a proper name so they could start using it to prin...

Is there any reason at all to think this will be better than, or fix any of the problems with, previous editions? The preview has a list of changes, but they're all conveniently vague enough that there is no way to tell whether the writers have any idea what they're doing. (Except for the part where...

I've read it. I somewhat regret paying money for the book, but I did. I really like the concept and flavor. "Noir mystery with superpowers based on myth and legend" is kind of a bizarre fusion of ideas, but I'm digging it. But it's still PbtA, which interests me not at all, largely for rea...

Actually, in the original 2e rules, you're allowed to bypass the limit of two WP from natural mental influence as long as you stunt to try a new approach to your argument. (What the GM will accept as a sufficiently new approach is up to him I guess, but stunting in general isn't supposed to be hard....

For what it's worth (it isn't worth anything), the Kickstarter backers have had the PDFs of Scion: Origin and Scion: Hero for a while now, and supposedly they will be shipping the physical books soon. The PDFs needed some edits but at least it had the general shape of a finished product. I do not kn...

Wait, what's this about Infernals paying more to attune to artifacts? Everyone pays double to attune to an artifact if the artifact doesn't match their Exalted type *. (Solars resonate with orichalcum, Lunars with moonsilver, and so on.) That's a general rule and not just for Infernals -- it's in th...

As far as the Ox-Body thing goes, the Alchemicals book states: Like all Ox-Body Technique equivalents, this Charm cannot be learned through the Eclipse, Moonshadow or Fiend anima abilities. You'd think that if the writers had time to write "stealth errata" into new books, they would have h...

I don't know where Frank found this particular cloud, so I can't tell you why some of the boxes are different shapes. I expect it has to do with number of Excellencies as another prereq. That's from third-edition Exalted, so there's only one Excellency for each skill, and Excellencies aren't a prer...

Orange sodas all taste pretty much the same to me, but the important distinction is that Sunkist is caffeinated and most others are not.

So now that this is actually out, has anyone looked over the mechanics yet? Trying to decide if I want to take a peek at the PDF or not. Things that seem actually kinda good: - Target numbers are always 6, with difficulty based on how many successes you need. I mean, that alone is objectively a hug...

I'm not a fan of bards being full casters, actually. I liked how in 3e bards were skilled melee arcanists with a pinch of divine casting and then you could take different PrCs to specialize in a different direction--Sublime Chord or Lyric Thaumaturge for more wizard-ness, Warrior Skald or Battle Ho...

I like how large monsters are no longer totally unbeatable in a grapple, and bards being proper full casters, but that's about it. Also, I still don't know which skill is used to find traps. Is it Perception or Investigation? The rulebooks don't seem consistent on this point. Trapfinding is traditio...

I kinda want to read the V5 book out of sheer curiosity (even though I have no doubt it will be a bad game and I already have V20 if I want to play a bad Vampire game for nostalgia), but it seems morally unacceptable to actually buy this.

Oh well.

As previously noted, a lot of RPGs -- possibly most? -- are built on the implicit premise that the PCs are a team. PVP under those conditions tends to arise from one of the players deciding to be a dick and disrupting the intended play experience for everyone else. Also, games that aren't well balan...

Hypothetically, if you could convince your coterie-mates to carry fire extinguishers around everywhere, couldn't your buddy spend a Willpower (in order to withstand Rotshreck for at least a turn) and hose you down before you die? I mean, it sounds kinda ridiculous (I suspect toting fire extinguisher...

For Thaumaturgy, there are at least six different ways to throw magical fire at people, and the exact mechanics make some of them extremely powerful and some literally worse than just punching people, You know, I was never sure of how the mechanics of Lure of Flames in combat were supposed to work....

Hey, at least this one actually delivered a product. And merely a year behind their estimates........ There was a time when I actually believed that Far West would exist in a playable form. What a sad, naive child I was...uh, seven years ago. Wow. (They're still sending updates every so often, but ...

I'm actually reminded somewhat of Mario Party: you'll take a hour to reach the final result, but the outcome is going to be very nearly random.

But at least some of the minigames in Mario Party are kinda fun.

Anyway, it's been a while since I actually read Bliss Stage, but if I remember correctly sex is probably the worst way to level up your relationship, I don't see any downsides to using sex in the rules. A given pair of characters need to have sex to get to the highest level of relationship, unless ...

I'm starting to think I should just never back RPG Kickstarters. So, there's this game . I foolishly thought "hey, Journey to the West is pretty cool, maybe this will be interesting!" without looking into the previews in any detail. The quickstart rules are here if you want to look at it y...

So, I've been playing a few sessions of 5e with my gaming group (better mediocre gaming than no gaming, I guess). When we left off last night, our 2nd-level party was facing a bunch of CR 1/2 gnolls who...each have more HP than even our toughest PC. It wasn't going well. The numbers don't seem to ad...

Has anyone ever come up with an actual non-crappy advancement system for Feng Shui? My group could probably get some mileage out of it if I could get my hands on a sane way to do advancement.