The Gaming Den

D&D is a bad system for trying to model different weapon profiles. The only thing D&D's AC/damage system ever made sense for was its original context, i.e. battleships lobbing shells at each other. When speaking of warships it makes sense to model a shell that misses and one that fails to pe...

And naturally the engine needs to flow well with far less experienced people - I 1000% agree. Naturally such a system doesn't work too well with inexperienced Game Masters. Unfortunately neither "doublethink" nor "having your cake & eating it too?" are on my card. :( It's a ...

Now that's obviously a lot less than there used to be. The US made ~70K warheads and at its peak had ~31K of them ready to be used. And yes, I believe the experts who say that most of those are, one way or another, gone. What happened to them? They've been powering your house for decades. That is s...

I'm struggling to imagine a conflict that would be meaningfully shaped by laser countermeasures. When the USA comes to teach one of those "shithole countries" a lesson about FREEDOM, the bad guys might be able to knock out a few satellites or protect a few key sites, but they won't have th...

Brand recognition is a powerful thing. The reason V5 was worth doing in the first place is that you recognized the name Vampire: The Masquerade and that caught your interest in a way that Undying , After Sundown , and Generic Vampire Thing did not. The debacle that was V5 may have squandered the res...

The idea that wealthy capitalists only sleep 4 hours a night is a memetic lie that is repeated by the wealthy because it reinforces a myth they prefer: That they are rich because they work hard, and the poor are poor because they're lazy. However every work study ever done shows us the people who w...

There's a thread on here where it's proposed that your two components of character class are... 1) Combat 2) Out of Combat So you may be... 1) Melee/Ranged burst/steady 2) healer, info gatherer, and other stuff I don't know what thread specifically you're referring to, but I definitely agree with t...

Also, 99% of skill feats are shit. That's really a missed opportunity, because if you read the forums you'll find a bunch of suggestions as to how to "un-shit" them and some of them even make sense (like taking the non-shit design of said 1% of good feats and applying it to the others). I...

Space exploration? Great, fantastic. Landing people on Mars as a technological and engineering challenge? Sure, whatever. Space colonization , on the other hand, is the dumbest fucking idea anyone has ever put forth as a serious public goal. Something Bruce Sterling said, as quoted by Charles Stross...

Inserting fictional elements into real-world atrocities is something you should not do in a way that 1) minimizes the suffering of the victims, 2) justifies the actions of the perpetrators, or 3) denies the culpability of the perpetrators. This is true whether we're talking about the Holocaust or ga...

I had to google chaparral, it seems a bit niche. Unless that's what you are going for, of course. Seven seems like it might be a bit many. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/img/biome/mission.jpg The hard part about this isn't picking seven biomes that are well-represented on Earth, sufficiently dis...

The Chechen government response to this is so fucking weird. From Kommersant : A spokesman for the head of the Chechen Republic, Alvi Karimov, told Kommersant that the game developers " drum up hype for themselves using the popularity of Chechnya and its leadership ." “If they tied this ga...

No setting bible is going to dictate, beyond a few handfuls, which cities are relative hot spots or dead zones. What the setting bible will do is tell you the benchmarks, and then writers of expansion material and MCs will build on that as they see fit. When some hack writes Seoul By Night and descr...

If I squint my brain a little, that doesn't seem too unlike the Cold War, with MAD in the form of breaking the masquerade. You could also think of it that way, sure. There are definitely hawks in the Sabbat's College of Cardinals who really do want to wipe the Camarilla off the face of the Earth, a...

So what you're saying is, Camarilla and Sabbat as political parties? Not exactly - there's not a Vampire Congress or whatever the fuck where every few Novembers you pull the lever for the Sabbat or Camarilla candidate for the Sheriff of Detroit. The analogy is more about the coexistence of these br...

Having a set of Traditions that all of your global and local conspiracies adhere to helps tremendously. When you get down to it, all you need are a handful of rules to make sure different domains are at least minimally capable of diplomatic exchange: 1) The Masquerade - everyone stays under it, peri...

And WW not-apologizes publicly again on Twitter . White Wolf community - We realize the way we have portrayed various topics in the recent Camarilla and Anarch setting books can be viewed as crude and insensitive. We appreciate this feedback and we are actively examining our choices in these books. ...

The "let's make the monsters sexy and identifiable" trope has been reinvented and templated onto different chunks of folklore repeatedly in history, at least back to ancient Persia, and probably before. Care to provide any examples? Particularly the ancient Persian one. Interview With The...

That is, the Slavic legends of the last thousand years or so about vampires loom very large in peoples' concepts of what a "Vampire" is. Bram Stoker leaned very heavily on Slavic lore when designing his vampire stories. And so while there are certainly blood drinking monsters in lots of l...

Wouldn't you still get old vampires (or need a reason not to), just not European ones? You would have as many musty old blood gods as you might want or need, without having to explain anything relating to a native European vampire species that went underground and concealed itself after thousands o...

That being said, Garlic is native to Central Asia and obviously is completely absent from traditional North and South American culture before the arrival of the Spanish. This reminds me of something that was mentioned a few pages ago while we were still riffing on Dracula as the progenitor of moder...

The map that gives me the most Chocopocalypse PTSD flashbacks is Finath River. You get too many Reds on that one and it's game over man. Random battles on that map are also very Chocobo-heavy, but 100% avoidable once you close the loop between Bethla Garrison and Limberry Castle.

Shrug. The things you said are true, and I acknowledge that my statement that you shouldn't use Teleport on anyone is hyperbole. However I do think Releport is a poor choice for a mainstay movement power, because I place less value on most of its advantages than the guarantee of an extra tile, unles...

Teleport sucks, don't use it on anyone. With the fail chance factored in it's less effective than any Move+X. You're seriously better off with Move+1 if you don't want to get your casters enough Thief JP for Move+2. Meliadoul is in a rough spot because her unique Job is less useful than Agrias' and ...

So if your city, however big it happens to be, has 100 vampires in it, 99 of those need to belong to your main groups of 5-10 clans (and if you're including witches/werewolves/others in your game, then those need to be part of that 5-10). A city with 100 supernaturals can maybe tolerate a single na...