The Gaming Den

Can you name a single publishing company in the Known Universe that works like you're describing? If not, does that make every single publishing company in the Known Universe a failure? There was a time when a great failure was a moderate success. Gygax's AD&D had major fail points in it. Whole...

If I'm understanding James Jacobs correctly, the way it works at Paizo is that the designers come up with new rules systems (like Words of Power or the custom race-building system for the Racial Supremacy Guide) and developers churn out feats, spells, adventures, etc. for use with the existing rule...

Open playtests look awesome on paper, but I don't know how you'd begin to implement them without being very open-minded. It doesn't even look good on paper. The general idea used in the industry is to design a game and then put the game to open playtest. Thus the open playtest occurs after everythi...

What's the difference between a Developer and a Designer? In their minds? I have no clue. I think ideally in the "real world" the developer is the one who makes the product specification and the designer is the one who makes the system specification based from the product specification. T...

Here is the NY Times article. There is an interesting question whether or not the NYT article forced the hand of WOTC. In any event it is an interesting article. When the N.B.A. adopted the 3-point shot in 1979, purists cried foul at rules changes, just as many D&D devotees dismissed the rules ...

Kicking employed people out of your economy will not cause increased economic production. Remind me not to do this too often, but I completely agree. There is a reason that places that teach prisoners workplace skills and help them find jobs experience less recidivism; people don't actually want to...

Kind of blows holes in your theory, no? Actually it doesn't. You need to drill down into the actual demographic information within Canada to understand the dynamic; a lot of it is kept under the rug as it were. Generally such diversity is located in the urban centers (the French Speakers don't live...

That's the tag line of the web page site.

To suggest that a subject must be classified as "politics" simply because it is sourced from a site that has "politics" in its name is so anal as to be ignore worthy.

Welcome to my list.

You can see it in the level ranges of the adventures released for AD&D. There's a lot of 1-3, of course, because everyone starts there, but there's also a lot of 4-6, 5-8, 7-9. We can pretty much all remember the 8-12 modules because there weren't that many of them, and you can count the number...

Ancient History wrote:Tzor, why this thread?

Because if you want to reboot the economy you are going to have to address all 30 of those issues.

Let's see now ... what's on my twitter feed? 30 Statistics That Show The Middle Class Is Dying Right In Front Of Our Eyes http://read.bi/rT1DvL #1 Today, only 55.3 percent of all Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 have jobs. #2 In the United States today, there are 240 million working age peopl...

No. It's supposed to be a roleplaying game divided into two parts: Combat challenges and Skill Challenges. Well it was SUPPOSED to be a system with two forms of concurrent resolution, combat challenges and skill challenges. They were SUPPOSED to work together at the same time. It is important to re...

Getting back to the original argument. I always thought and assumed that the big evolution of the mega jump between casters and non casters in 3E was the systematic simplification of the magic system. There were a lot of checks and balances in 1E's magic. These were thought to be "un-fun" ...

I'm going for a classical date ... 2018 A.D.

Yeah, agreed. Folks sometimes hanging their dislike of an entire system on a single example of change - it's just shorthand. Most folks won't have time to sit and listen to the whole explanation, so the old-school gamer picks one of the more easily recognized changes that bug him and uses that as a...

Yes Lago, please don't. I mean you look at a nation like Sweeden and you say "Look at Sweeden now, it's socialist and it's got high income mobility; socialiam rocks." But then, this is Sweeden, who has always rocked even before the welfare state. Early on, Sweden was a country where poor c...

THAC0 was the sacred cow of pre-3rd edition D&D. It's the mechanic which gave D&D its reputation as a convoluted an math-heavy game even in far-detached sources like the Straight Dope. It was not a 2E-only invention, either. If THAC0 is not a sacred cow then nothing is. The only two things ...

I watched the New Years Eve Countdown from Rome. Everyone spoke Italian.

Yes! Happy New Year! MMXII

"Unfortunately, double zero is still zero." -Me :) Unless you are playing roulette. :tongue: Besides, that's still the best reward we give out to members of the Knights of Columbus Honor guard. "We'll put another zero on your check." "00" is better than "0" r...

Point of order. I don't bitch and I can't get women to fuck me. I don't think bitching has anything to do with it one way or the other.

I'm not going to lie, the southern gentleman accent is working perfectly. Particularly with pronouncing laboratory as Lah-Bore-ah-tory. I need to think up voices for everyone now. Actually in Lan guil ender speak you drop the o so it's more like la-bra-tor-ey. Four syllabyles are enough for the wor...

Jewish tradition is somewhat anti-Egyptian, but not completely so. There is no embalming, no removal of organs (save for autopsies and organ donation), a simple cloth cover, and no coffin (if there is one holes are drilled into them to allow contact with the earth). Tombstones are requires to identi...

From what I've gleaned, Tzor lives in a fairly nice house on Long Island, lived with his parents for most of his life ... Here are the actual numbers. I'm currently 50. Not counting the 18 years that I first lived before college, I returned home after college becuse the rental scene in the 80's on ...