The Gaming Den

I don't know about you, but I've had zero problems with radfems trying to censor my campaigns.

How about looking at the words BEFORE pot, bell, and lock: Typical, high-quality, Complex or Superior item. Extrapolation isn't hard: typical would be something a short order cook might make, like a meal at a sit-down chain restaurant. High-quality would be something made to order, like the wedding ...

Subtraction IS system specific, or at least, a common artifact of roll-under. Subtraction sucks, yo. If you put a "play" button on a device, you'll likely put it in the shape of a triangle, or label a button with a picture of a triangle, pointing right. It's functionally identical to using...

If you REALLY want to be edgy, why not put the whole "murder is a given in RPG" thing under a microscope? Why, in a world where you can Force Cage fugitives, and use Charm Person to rehabilitate career recidivists, is it taken as an axiom that killing is a necessary part of survival? Shoul...

d20 does have a "degree of success" not mentioned yet, too: "take 10" or "take 20". A pastry chef could probably take 10 indicate that making a wedding cake won't result in an episode of The Three Stooges. A master chef could 'take 20" to prepare a meal from puffer...

Here's where I see roll-under being not as good as addition to reach target number, even when they're the same thing (in the algebraic sense). To model a cooking challenge in d20, I can eyeball the difficulty of something like climbing a rope. and climbing a rock face without tools, and other exampl...

My approach is "don't", at least it is after my disastrous Black Crusade campaign, I've stopped running games where the players can be bad guys. If it's a grimdark setting, you can, at worst, consensually rip bodices.

Most MMORPGs could do with removing leveling completely. They're clearly only using it force more mileage out of repetitive content, rather than the risk/reward approach of something like D&D, Dark Souls, or Dungeon Crawl SS. Heck, Star Wars TOR doesn't even have any pretenses: the questing syst...

Here's my genre impression from each game: Hero classifies it as being more dramatic when The Hulk lifts a buss than when Superman lifts a bus, because The Hulk has to put his groin into it, where other games might say lifting a bus is interesting no matter who does it. GURPS is about making it fun ...

"Perhaps the only precept taught me by Grandfather Wills that I have honored all my adult life is that profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you."

I always appreciated how in the Shin Megami Tensei games, you could talk to just about any creature you can encounter. Some would ask you for things, others would bribe you with things in order to not get killed. Some could be recruited to your party (every SMT game has some sort of pokemon metagame...

He also has a tendency to use "Denner" as if the same hivemind embodied both Frank and shadzar.

God forbid someone explode into invective, such as

You asked for it, Shit-for-Brains

Since when do modern gamers eschew Diablo? Or are you saying that Diablo 3 itself isn't "like Diablo" and what they're eschewing are the true spiritual successors ? It's a broad category that includes subsets that do, just as "Tabletop RPG player" covers 4rries, grognards, Paizo...

The Fallout games let you diplomance and ghost your way into a run with as few kills as possible. And it's not some thing where you're like "I have 18 Charisma, you can't make me fight, evil GM!" Zero/Low kill runs require a lot of attention to the situation. Dark Souls can be beaten witho...

AFAICT, the octopus that lives in Zak S' head gets very angry if he doesn't respond to people saying mean things about him. On the internet. That's a dreadful state to be in, but it does seem to be an appropriate punishment for the methods he uses. As for everyone else, I think they're trying to br...

No, it is possible to get, at best, a successful Charm roll. Against one guy. No, it is possible to get better results than a Charm spell. You gave no restriction on the benefits/requests of a successful Charisma check, so therefore you can ask for things that the Charm spell wouldn't get out of th...

Why is everyone so hung up about rules on this forum, especially considering you're playing RPG's where there's no winners or losers? I mean, I could understand splitting hairs about rules concerning a wargame or a boardgame. RPGs in my experience have always been quasi-games. Sorry for the newb qu...

Based on my lurkings in the Old Man Henderson thread, I'm also inclined to believe that, like Bloody Mary or The Candy Man or Candle Jack, that he magically appears if you say his name three times into Google.

There does seem to be a pleasant irony in a thread mocking a blog post with one comment, undergoing thread necromancy a few months later after getting exactly 1 reply.

Iran is set to dial their legal age of marriage, and by extension their age of consent, to 10 years old. Iran's "houserule" probably wouldn't work very well applied to other countries.

It seems to me like Mearls "ragequit" out of public pllaytesting after the feedback didn't properly parse through his confirmation bias.

I think there's two kinds of exceptionalism for protagonists. One is just that protagonists are luckier and find themselves near death more often than dead than other people. A lot of games already simulate that. Where they tend to fall short is why, if spells like Wish exist, why are there still su...

Part of where I feel trying to model attrition falls flat is that, typically, RPGs support two modes of play: A) Dungeon crawling. Unless you have one of those "fun" dungeons where the door locks behind you magically as you enter, you can 15-minute work day it all you like. Maybe someone t...

While I do think it's pretty neat having non-regenerating health in shooters, I don't understand how games with regenerating health are somehow unable to utilize space, environment, and enemy compositions. It was a shoddy metaphor. I like the health systems of Halo (the first one) and Escape from B...