The Gaming Den

'Epic' is a storytelling mode, derived from the long poetic epics such as the Iliad or similar prose narratives such as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The central structural element of an epic is that the heroes do things that are important . This doesn't mean they are flashy or spectacular or e...

How many items you can carry depends on your Power, which is fairly tightly regulated and also related to feats of strength. It's also important to note that this counts the Equipment you're wearing, too. I'm still working on the actual weights, but my idea is that most bullshit items are Negiligib...

I don't have a 'whole' system done yet but I've got scattered ideas and notes. Right now I'm thinking of just treating assets like equipment that you can buy, sell, or swap out just with a longer timer before anything is extracted from them. The assets that generate wealth will act like 'equipment ...

Am I missing anything? Price wars aren't really something I care to model, but I know how frustrating it can be to invest into crafting shit only to find out that you'll break even at best . Should I not even bother with this? Unless your game is primarily about crafting and/or business management ...

There is an argument to be made that the MCU movies are overly similar in matters of structure, theme, and tone, and to some extent 'if you've seen one, you've seen 'em all' (there's a reason Honest Trailers was able to do an 'every MCU movie' compilation spoof). But that's both hardly unique to the...

Since we're on the subject, can anyone else confirm or refute that Timothy Zahn's Conquerors' trilogy would make for a good miniseries? I've had a soft spot for it, but it ain't quite high literature, and I've never discussed it with someone else who has actually read it. It also has issues with we...

To make a film or tv show with a big budget, you need to convince the money guys that there is interest in your property. The above properties were successes in their original form, and so they were funded. The fact is that they were not good enough to be translated to film, and almost certainly we...

I don't think that's the major issue - if you consider the original movie (or trilogy) good space opera, then it's certainly POSSIBLE. In a sense, I think they try too hard with the movies. With the side-projects that are outside of the 'Skywalker lineage saga' they feel less constraint and they do...

Pretty sure the reason people care about Star Wars has a lot to do with the peripheral products, games like Battlefront, Jedi Academy, and KotOR, a wide variety of toys and books. There have been new meaningful Star Wars things coming out all the time for the entirety of my life, and the new movies...

Most D&D magic items are ostensibly made from the same materials as a normal version of the item, just somehow 'made special.' Alchemy is probably the best framework - in a western fantasy context - for understanding this, and it probably involves a lot of treating you item with special reagents...

Pretending that "Evil is a tangible force and the Lower Planes are made of evil-ons" is uniquely mind-bending and campaign-ruining compared to all the others, when the lore-obsessed find it just as easy to comprehend and incorporate as any other impossible bits of setting flavor and the b...

I also agreed with everything in Kaelik's post, and almost everything in your latest. The only place where we disagree is that I don't think it's accurate to say that only contrarians coming from outside the D&D paradigm question the association between "the Good alignment" and "...

It is very, very important, with regard to this question, to differentiate between settings that are actually attempting to present an internally consistent fictional world, and those that are not. The question of realism doesn't apply to the latter at all, and the demand for verisimilitude is drast...

It's also probably also worth mentioning that there are lots of players who just can't handle complexity. A "realistic" world just happens to involve a very simple and understandable system with few inputs and outputs. I don't think that's quite right. It is entirely possible to model a l...

You basically summed up what I wanted to say: game worlds need laws of physics, and the default laws of physics we have are the ones in reality. If you want to have a game world where non-real-world actions are possible, then you better have a comprehensive list of those actions because my mind wil...

In general, the greater the level of fantastical elements introduced into a fictional universe - in both amount and potency - the more difficult it becomes to have that universe maintain verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is very important in terms of producing dramatic heft, specifically in keeping the...

If I say "for twenty dollars, I'll give you a set of RPG rules that are better than Munchausen," and you give me twenty dollars, and I give you a copy of Exalted, you got scammed, son. Well, people don't necessary purchase RPG books entirely, or in fact at all, for the rules. They do so f...

The problem with making a simplified version of Exalted's mechanics is that you run into the same problem that you have just running it using FATE or your rules-lite of choice: the fluff is still a fever dream of madness, the world is still too big, and for a world that is intended as some sort of p...

Hence the cautious-ness about giving PCs strong abilities - it might make the players enjoy the game more , but it might also piss off those who get overshadowed or GMs that have their plot unexpected bypassed. And many people will still enjoy the game enough - meaning enough that in a couple years...

My understanding is that an edition's health is largely driven by core book sales. Supplements are gravy on top, but the potatoes is new core book sales. You'd expect a new edition when core book sales drop off. There's no evidence I can see that PHB sales are slowing significantly (coming in at 38...

I loved the Stackpole novels back in the day, since they gave a larger scale picture of the whole Inner Sphere. By now I realize that some of his dialogue is pretty cringey, but he still manages to deliver a lof of knockout punches when I re-read the novels. Stackpole is a rock solid writer by the ...

At least with hacking you can just decide it happens very fast - "pro-level hackers all use brain implants, so 6-18 seconds is typical." Things like walking a few blocks or even getting from one floor to another are glacial in combat terms. In fiction, it's solved by the other action havi...

This sounds a lot like a post X-Com 2 world to me, with the PCs being former members of the ADVENT. The overall backstory elements you've mentioned seem to match up well enough to the events of that game and the War of the Chosen expansion that I'm wondering if you might not be better of just doing ...

I think the reason people think characters have few options is because they just suck at figuring out which options are good. So basically, if you pick a shit class and shit feats your character will be shit. Which is true in 3.X as well. If you pick better classes you can do plenty of things. The ...

Assumptions matter regarding the ancient world do matter - because the ancient world happened . If you change the ancient world in any significant way you do not get the modern world that resembles our own. You have to keep the supernaturals from dramatically changing the course of history. As a res...