The Gaming Den

Shade, from Arsenal, is a magical compound that forces users to astrally project. I thought there was a street drug that did the same (pre Ghost Cartels) but I haven't found it.

I also think coming up with problems for a low level party to deal with is much more manageable than for a high level party. Everyone needs to have a pretty high degree of system mastery for villains to fall in the band between trivial and invincible if scry-and-die is on the table. Also, all of the...

It's an OK plot hook, but I think the presentation is pretty terrible. I agree that Orion's interpretation suitably cyberpunky, but giving some hints that AIs are involved in shadowchat would help to satisfy me more. As it stands, the plot development just looks like metaplanes for technomancers. An...

The other fun catastrophe is that AIs can apparently (haven't read it, just inferring from Dumpshock) change ownership of devices in combat time. Ownership is a super powerful stick, and this breaks the one safeguard in the matrix in half. So while this probably doesn't actually happen fast enough t...

I'm detecting a lot of negative sentiment about orchestrating a PC betrayal, and I'd like to understand it a little bit better because I don't have nearly as many reservations about this plot arc as the rest of you guys seem to. Yes, there are deeply shitty ways to turn on the party. For instance, a...

I've never seen anyone play Shadowrun with minis, that's a game that's almost entirely theater of the mind right? If so, how do GM's usually handle AoE attacks like chucking grenades and laying down suppressive fire, how do they handle ducking behind cover and charging into melee? Have you ever pla...

Redstone and PL make some solid points; the players of PCs that betrayed their own my Shadowrun group still get shit after fifteen years. Note that Shadowrun is a game where backstabbing is somewhat expected. Further, long experience shows that PCs are going to go full nuclear once they realize that...

I played a game very similar to this proposal once (a decade ago) that was about pitching products. Unfortunately, I can't find the name with Google -- it's not Pitch It! or Life's a Pitch . Momo's scoring method was exactly what was used. It leads to this really weird state where you want to have t...

To clarify, I actually think the introduction does a great job with most context clues: Shudde'Mell was an exception that I felt was worth noting.

Shudde'Mell could use a bit more context. There's foreshadowing of his return, but his introduction lacks the usual context clues to clue-in less mythos savvy readers (me) that he's a giant Cthonian.

Seconding the idea that building a troll is a pretty bad idea, especially since mystic adepts are priority hungry: they need magic 6 (since that shows up in all magic skill rolls), generally want high attributes to be an adept that gets into combat, and have higher than usual demand for skills becau...

Echoing Flatline, I think the virtue of going with something abstract like the AS chase system is that you can get most of the information you need from relative positioning of vehicles, and you can keep the energy of the chase higher if people aren't fretting about the details of squares and turnin...

You also are assuming that the choice of target numbers was up to those making 4e rather then being thrust on them as a requirement. I've been staying out of this because I don't have the time or the energy (you're a hero, deaddm), but I felt the need to pull this gem out in case anyone is only ski...

You also are assuming that the choice of target numbers was up to those making 4e rather then being thrust on them as a requirement. I've been staying out of this because I don't have the time or the energy (you're a hero, deaddm), but I felt the need to pull this gem out in case anyone is only ski...

http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/22/8470473/dungeons-dragons-virtual-tabletop-fantasy-grounds Abandoning the Morningstar crowd seems to have paid off for WOTC. I don't use virtual table tops, so I have no idea whether the software here is any good. But I'm impressed that they've released anything after...

I ran my longest D&D campaign in 4e. The system ran out of steam at about level 7 but the game dragged until level 14. The latter half was a slog for me, but the campaign was an accomplishment, so I remember 4e fondly. I especially like very low level 4e because resources are so sparse that peop...

The RAW says that you roll a separate to-hit roll for each target and then a single damage roll.

Quick correction to Otakusensei's excellent list: the availability of wired 2 got errataed down to the point you could get it at chargen without restricted gear. That's a factoid which is not at all obvious because it relies on which printing of the book you're looking at.

The thing is that getting to know some Cleric spells is not actually "quite a boost." To a first approximation, casting Cleric spells as a Sorcerer makes you a shitty Cleric. Because Clerics get a much nicer class chassis than Sorcerers do. Adding Wizard spells to the Cleric is an obvious...

The rules also give the GM a lot of leeway in when edge refreshes. Unless there's a big disparity in the party edge scores you can always starve them by making it refresh per run or per week.

Synaptic boosters are very essence friendly but quite expensive. They won't get you your 4th IP at chargen, but they do fine for most games I've played in. You also can't combine synaptic boosters with reaction enhancers, so you're taking a minor speed hit (2 less reaction compared to wired 2 + reac...

You can also take the merciful curse as an oracle to gain lay on hands. If there's a way to pick up smiting (and I expect there's a feat that does it) then you're all the way there.

Looks like Hevea won't do the chapter per page thing, but there's a companion program called Hacha that will chunk Hevea output into linked webpages. They're apparently controlled by a common configuration file but I'm having trouble finding Hacha docs except for a quick reference inside the Hevea m...

Upon closer observation, latex2html hasn't been updated since I last looked at it (2001) and the maintainer of tex4ht is dead. Given that information, I might hook my horse to Hevea.

I'm a big fan of TEX source and PDF output. You could probably add HTML output using relatively little effort by invoking HEVEA, latex2html or tex4ht in a Makefile. I have no experience with any of those programs except very tangentially with latex2html: it seemed to keep pretty utilitarian websites...