The Gaming Den

Is that really the release schedule or just fan speculation? Because I cannot find a time table going even into 2016 on the website, much less 2018.

Well, they are called Raptorans, and raptors are a sort of classification of birds, like, a bald eagle is a raptor, but I kind of thought that they would look like velociraptors. Yet every picture is kind of crummy and shows them looking like a bird, like a really bad run of Hawkman comics. I think ...

You go the Sacred Tattoos into that trait that increases luck bonus. You have a +2 luck bonus to your saves and then you are a full caster with a race that starts +2 to your casting stat and the casting stat is Constitution. Its the down and dirty way to Winning Pathfinder. Sure, you can do stronger...

Paizo is the bigger game company than Dungeons and Dragons as a portion of WOTC that is a subsidiary of HASBRO, who clearly has no fucks to give about pen and paper roleplaying games after the Pathfinder and 4E fiasco. Paizo has about 40 people on full time. They've got 4 to 5 times as many writers ...

Something point buy, especially if the group is actually going to be committed to learning it. With how popular superheroes are, the 4 people might like that to begin with so I'd already have a hook for a mid approaching high level Mutants and Masterminds of Champions/HERO game. Something like a 500...

I think Assassin just sounds unsavory and its been linked to Evil alignment for so long in Dungeons and Dragons. I know it sounds generic and everybody is supposed to be a killer somehow, but what about a class named Killer? I hate to give Pathfinder props, but their Ranger/Rogue smoosh together had...

I think one thing to note as a Pathfinder conjurist is that high level spells with longer durations is the way to go. Pumping out a ton of lower level creatures really isn't going to get you there. The summoning last is crazy backloaded. 5th level on up is when you start getting the juicy stuff, Cel...

Local game stores have been disappearing along with regular bookstores. The folks who can get their fix from a specialty shop is a lot lower now than it used to be. Even those shops that are still around seem to be devoting less space to RPGs. Amazon is a universal channel for people 300+ miles fro...

With the decline in not just book store sales, but just the existence of book stores period and the ascendancy of online shopping, I find it difficult to believe the brick and mortar stores have the same chunk of distribution that they had 10 years ago close to the start of 3.5. Something like 1000 ...

I've got some current sales data for this and last month. If you look at the PHB's sales from last year on that site, it looks like it sold roughly 8k books on Amazon over a five month span in the States. And ~33k all total (Germany really seemed to like it) since its release. Holy fuckaroni. There...

Congrats, Riot, you destroyed Ryze. Cuz he was such a problem, right? Turning Q into a skillshot is enough to put him in the garbage bin. That does not work in this game. Rune Prison got across the board nerfs, even on its AP ratio. For Jinx, she wasn't even a top 5 ADC I don't think but her Super M...

That could be it. Windjammer and others have said that Dungeons and Dragons is working on a skeleton crew and that for every Dungeons and Dragons employee, Paizo's got three. The third party farming is a way for the Dungeons and Dragons guys to hook their friends up, some of them fired after the 4E ...

Speaking of Mearls, is this his last hurrah? If 5E flops, and to my read of the situation it looks like it is flopping, is he out of the company, or at least demoted? Unless he's tunneling like a mole and "knows where the bodies are buried," what could be the reason for keeping him around?...

I just think the point is that Pathfinder gave casters, especially wizards, higher floors. The absolute ceiling of broken stuff (planar ally cheesedom, quickened summoning and other things to beef that up, Fun With Wishes and Broken prestige classes and undercosted, overpowered legacy items and feat...

Wow, 5E sold better than a game that hadn't had new product put out for it in like 3 years, and was officially announced as an unsupported dead edition in January 2012. Its "really on a tear."

Yet "really on a tear" is corporatespeak with no hard evidence backing it up. What is he supposed to say? "Our other game divisions are up and Magic: The Gathering has been selling like hotcakes for a decade now, but Dungeons and Dragons is shitting the bed." Especially for a coo...

Benchmarks for 4E success or failure: 1. Lasted as long as expected before revision (3 to 5 years) No. The game released all core books simultaneously in June 2008. By September 2010, Essentials released. 2. Lasted about as long as 3.0/3.5 Again, no. Game came out in 2000, lasted until late 2007, ea...

The thing that doomed the edition was like, the 3 year period where they announced a bunch of canceled product lines and put out something like 7 books in 2 years. 5E is managing to not match that sluggish behavior, but they've already had delays on core books within the first year and have announce...

Naturally they pick *the* most expensive option of them all. Want to run a game? 40 bucks. Want to play a game? Fuck you it's the same license. 5 people will cost 200 bucks. UNLESS. One player buys the engine and then magnanimously spends *another* 120 dollars to upgrade to "ultimate" edi...

The videos and the articles where they mocked people for things they liked in 3.0 and 3.5 was hysterically bad public relations work. At least by pulling barbarians, bards, druids, monks, sorcerers, gnomes and half-orcs they proved the 5 Percent Rule. One person out of 20 is disappointed about somet...

Captpike, what do you think about this idea? The thing that sunk 4E was their pie in the sky promises. They didn't want to just try to duplicate 3.5's roaring success, a difficult enough task by itself, no, they said they were going to be an online-integrated, autonomous, 50 million dollar a year en...

seems like 5e didnt crash and burn as the DEN predicted Wait, is 5e actually making money? This is news to me. After the 4E promises of 50 million dollars a year, self-policed division comparable to Magic:The Gathering all turned out to be false, HASBRO went on a disappointed and vindictive rampage...

So your evidence that Essentials is a success is that we haven't demonstrated its failure? How about the fact that it divided the fanbase of a struggling game system and doesn't exist anymore? Or is that too anecdotal?

I have no idea why Tristana was given such an extensive and bizarre rework. She's definitely fallen off for me personally. It just seems so gimmicky and you don't even do as much damage as you used to for all the added gimmickry. They're really pushing the idea of lots of viability and new champs be...

The court case is damning. Never read it, just heard about it. The claim that 6 million people played Dungeons and Dragons could easily be prior edition and 3.0/3.5 players. That 6 million has very little to do with 4E players. "22. In its first week on sale, Player’s Handbook 2 reached #28 of ...