The Gaming Den

-There is the Pathfinder/Call of Cthulhu/Onyx Path trick. A game's basic book is the real cash cow. So a couple of years from now you release a brand New Ars Magica 5th edition revised. Fully compatible with all 5th edition supplements. It is basically the same book as Ars Magica 5th. Except some th...

No what Frank reviewed is a Czech game that may have been influenced lightly by DSA. The scary thing about DSA is, that you can always confidently (over a timespan of 30 years!) state about the designers, that they should have known better. They were never isolated from the American rpg scene. They ...

Oddly enough my wife mentioned the pending American release of this the other week. Then asked if I knew anything about it... to which I replied "I think The Den reviewed it... and it wasn't good" . :p I looked, can't find any review of it here on the Den. Having recently read the DSA 5e ...

I don't think DSA does anything so exceptionally well that adopting it is worth the effort. There are a whole lot of existing systems, originally in English, that are designed to do or can be adapted to do everything it does. Basically the game exists at all because of linguistic and cultural barri...

I think that DSA is simply to low magic to make that sort of stuff work. In D&D lots of gold=almost any magic item=quasi-unlimited power if you picked up the right stuff. In DSA you'll just crash the diamond part of the gem market. If you are the only person abusing that loophole in the setting,...

Stahlseele wrote:But why would you even need to fight anymore, if you can just WISH-ECONOMY for it?

Because you are fighting/adventuring for something that you can't buy with money?

Which is actually the case in most of the adventures ever published for DSA.

Korwin That is a problematic loophole, but isn't exactly Pun-Pun level rules abuse. http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Pun-Pun_(3.5e_Optimized_Character_Build) Or even, my well build druid is a better fighter, than even the most optimized fighter build without spellcasting, or psi imaginable, that you see...

Speaking from personal experience. Dark Sun (1st version), Mystara, Spelljammer, Ravenloft and Forgotten Realms all work very well with only some very modest tweaking. But that is the problem isn't it? The need for adjustment before a setting works. The least bad? Possibly Ravenloft, because the twe...

You can't know Das Schwarze Auge until you played it with germans. But anyway, it's like someone thought 3.5 was too simple, but didn't make casters quite powerful enough. So they went out to fix this. And at least in those two goals, succeeded. I have played DSA of and on since 1984. Usually of, '...

From my experience DSA (designers and gamers) has always been full of grognards. And it has to be, otherwise everybody would realize that DSA is like DnD when it comes to "wizards are better than you". I think that DSA 5 (I've participated in the open Beta playtest) is way to complicated ...

Prak wrote:Any indication whether this is a just a translation, or a new edition? I didn't see either, but I only skimmed.

Both. It is a translation to coincide with the new 5th edition.

(again)

The quickstart rules
http://ulisses-us.com/thedarkeye/
The facebook page
https://www.facebook.com/thedarkeyegame

I don't know what to say about this....

Lord Mistborn You seem to have coined that expression in 2010. And you are no doubt very proud of this accomplishment and maybe a little disappointed that it never quite caught outside of this messageboard. Did you ever come up with a clearcut definition, or is this a case of: "if you don't kno...

Nigh Goat It's the 13th century. The Mongols, the bubonic plague, the crusades, local factions within the church without common sense, local noblemen also lacking common sense etc.. Than there are rivals within the Order of Hermes, rival magical orders, the Fae, magical monsters, the Devil and his m...

fbmf
You are right. So I will quit that shit.

Whipstitch Speaking from practical experience, having played short campaigns of 2nd, 3rd (1x each) and 5th (2X). 5th fixes stuff that caused us trouble in actual play during our earlier campaigns. To be honest we never noticed the issues with the magic system beyond Herbam being maybe a bit underpow...

Red Archon I'm a game consumer I have no stake beyond that in the hobby, but I don't believe my personal tastes should be the standard. People who believe that are either very naive, or nutcases. My standard of success is the simple 2 axis system of: How many people get exited by the idea of playing...

Why did this thing win the Origins Award in the category best rpg? Was the competitions that bad? Industry awards as a whole are extremely bullshit. Very famously, Do The Right Thing didn't even get nominated, which resulted in Driving Miss Daisy getting an Oscar on a protest vote. But even within ...

Erik I cop to trolling a guy named Trollman with an ego the size of a blue whale, how could I not? But to be honest, while I like Ars Magica, I don't think it is the bestest. Playing requires running an administration. The basic dice mechanics are counterintuitive. It is as specialized as Pendragon....

Why did this thing win the Origins Award in the category best rpg? Was the competitions that bad? 2 reasons. Frank is wrong and it is a better version of this game* than the previous 4. I suspect the Origins Awards have radically different tastes than the locals on this board. *despite that triumph...

Ars Magica pretends to be a rpg about fantasy wizards in a version of the 13th century that functions like the people back then thought it did. Supporting good suspension of disbelieve to people who get excited about that idea matters more than actually succeeding at that idea. At least it does whe...

Amazing how much 5th gives of the same vibe as 2nd edition/gazetteer era basic D&D. I remember the days few people on the internet admitted liking that stuff. It is almost like the designers made a list of all the stuff in the old editions that was ignored in the last 2 editions and made sure it...

Dear Frank, Breath goes in, breath goes out. Try to reach a zen like state of calm. Relax. What you personally accept, or not about any given rpg is irrelevant to its success. Me, I thought that the rules of Shadowrun prior to 4th edition were very much needlessly complicated. Game was still a hit. ...

Early Ars Magica is a long list of smart, Original (and yes lazy) ideas often poorly implemented. What 5th edition Ars does right is repairing those ideas where possible. And yes in a lot of places structural repair is not possible. Not without drastically changing the rules to the point that the es...