The Gaming Den

Then, how is anyone ever condemned for murder in the USA? You can basically always claim you were "afraid" for your life: The standard for fearing for one's life is based on reasonability - you have to be able to claim that a reasonable person placed in the same situation would fear for t...

This has to do with how the legal standards for deadly force are conducted in the US. What is legally permissible is not equivalent to what is commonly considered moral and what a civilians judgement is based on media reports is not what the legal judgment is going to be based on the boundaries of u...

True. But their differences mean increasingly little. The scramble for power means that even those who start out with meaningful goals have to compromise, limit, and eventually abandon what they initially wanted to do. You do realize that the need to compromise and limit action is due to the specif...

I'm with Wiseman. I think the movie really tried too hard to be liked by everyone, like that one kid in class who really wants to get along with everyone and tries to get the other kids to like him, but ends up being really annoying and no one wants to be around him and his name is Eric. The primar...

Fuck Star Wars d20, a blade is a blade, and Stormtroopers are career soldiers in a fantasy setting. It makes sense Finn knows at least the basics of how to wield a sabre, let alone Kylo Ren, who was supposedly trained in the Jedi Academi that existed off-camera before the mouse nuked it along with ...

Jumping out inside a planetary shield isn't supposed to work because getting that close to a gravity well in hyperspace is supposed to splatter your vessel across the extradimensional space as a fine blue mist. In fact, star wars hyperdrives are supposed to have emergency systems that pull you out o...

What game mechanical niche was that, I seem to recall the Nagaraja were the borderline-unplayable flesh-eaters? If I recall deep-diving the lore correctly, the Nagaraja largely existed so that the True Black Hand would have access to necromancy, which it needed due to its multitude of links to the ...

He had a complete map of the galaxy, which isn't exactly a crazy concept for a droid. It's been stated in the movie that complete maps were hard to come by, very likely because of the whole break down of the government. The map fragment only gave directions within the immediate area, and was worthl...

To me, they had to abandon the EU for reasons (people whining about Game of Thrones Spoilers for seasons of the show covering 10 year old books, the fact that Harrison Ford doesn't want to fucking be in these movies, comes to mine), but aside from them having to, they definitely should have because...

Longes wrote:Can we get an Aberrant review? I've heard about this game being shit, but I've never been able to find a single copy of the book or see a single game run online.

I have the pdfs and have played in Aberrant games, I suppose I can take a stab at it.

The difficulty is not in disparities between heroes and masses. It is the disparities between heroes (which is what you're talking about in the rest of your post). As the range of power levels grow wider, and power diversity increases, the probability of introducing a power or a combination of such...

The biggest issue of Rey's over-competence is her piloting ability. As a scavenger engineering proficiency and self-defense skills are things she should probably have, blasters aren't an especially complex technology and she's presented as a good shot not a ridiculous one, and I'm willing to forgive...

Yeah, 'egg-laying mammals' is a reasonable vernacular shorthand for just about anything in the Therapsida that doesn't qualify as part of the Mammalia crown group. That's a fairly diverse group with ~150 million years of evolutionary history, roughly the same as crown group mammals. Therapsids don't...

Several of the extant thaumaturgy paths - Path of Transmutation of the top of my head, but surely others - allow for fairly general fast-effects like 'make object stronger' or 'turn solid to liquid' (the path of written by someone with little knowledge of physics or chemistry and if interpreted acco...

Except for shit blowing up. I'm an undiscerning movie-goer, and shit blowing up was sufficient to make me sit through every Transformer film, but here I cannot help but be disappointed. Force Awakens lacks any single WOW! sequence, which is something that even the worst prequels had - Phantom Menac...

A smart mage never attacks directly with Magic, that's a sucker's bet. The OP nature of mage is in enhancing attacks you already have - like using a forces effect to 'overcharge' your plasma rifle for an extra four agg damage with every attack for a scene - or in extended rituals. Mages have a uniqu...

A bitter Mechalich reviews The Force Awakens (having been forced to see it against his will by his parents as part of the holidays): So...where to begin. Okay, first of all, lets get this out of the way. This is a professional, well-produced movie with competent direction, generally good acting, and...

If you are using the standard D&D cosmology it is not especially difficult to utilize gateways to elemental planes or specialized demiplanes to produce infinite energy or infinite physical resources. As such you could trigger an industrial revolution if you discovered some pressing need to make ...

The whole 'the Technocracy largely ignores vampires' bit is part of the oWoD game design of trying to keep the games as separate as possible. The metaplot explicitly violated this at several points anyway , notably in the week of nightmares. This was necessary because in oWoD Mages curb-stomped Vamp...

I've got three words too: Global. Fucking. Warming. This is an issue of potentially civilization-ending importance and at minimum has the potential to bankrupt nations and launch massive wars. Do the Democrats and Republicans believe the same thing on this subject? No, not even close. Obama just con...

I don't know why you think anyone can get elected actually saying "We're not doing things that would be cheaper and better than my proposals because the system is corrupt and dysfunctional. Vote for me, because I support the best proposals that have a snowball's chance in Hell of getting throu...

So this entire fight scene between Roy and Durkula resolved nothing, It concluded nothing, it didn't advance the plot, it was a complete waste of our time. For actual months. This part is the most annoying to me. Bad plots happen, but a complete failure to recognize the amount of real time that is ...

Unfortunately, if Vampire is the flagship franchise the Technocracy should probably be eliminated entirely. Black-suited G-men who erase evidence of the supernatural, using what looks like high-tech gadgets, is something that should exist though -- it seems like it fits right in the with the "...

Unfortunately, if Vampire is the flagship franchise the Technocracy should probably be eliminated entirely. Reduce the different traditions to cultural groups, no one's write, no one's wrong, and there is no technomagic. Just increase the impact of Paradox (and throw in some technological Weaver spi...

Dragon Ball does it pretty well. Bulma is the wealthiest, smartest person in the world and the world runs on her Capsule Corps technology. Senzu beans are used to recover in fights mid-battle, Dragon Balls are used to recover from any global disaster. Mr. Satan gets the credit that the protagonists...