The Gaming Den

Oh I just skipped over that sort of and went right into ripping off Condemned and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Where the monsters might be in your head but you sure as hell can stab most of them.

I'm tackling trying to make a working Call of Cthulhu game with actual working mechanics that doesn't use d% because d% is the bane of all existence.

It's uh....slow going.

That sounds inherently fun and engaging, but would require a lot of legwork on the DMs part to set up interesting rooms to brawl in.

It's an interesting design goal, if heavily flawed in execution.

The more I read into Pathfinder 2, the more it reads like a video game. It seems like its made for official play only and nothing else, given the lack of flexibility with anything in there.

I've seen some rank bullshit from a very recent 5e inspired OSR. I forget the name, but they added a luck stat equal to 10 + 1/2 your level, with your level maxing out at 12. This governs all of your saving throws, your random encounter rolls, and the game's 'revolutionary' retreat mechanic. Every t...

And yet I haven't seen many products from the OSR movement that actually want to re-create the high level experience. In fact, I haven't seen any products that really have a 'high level' in mind. It's all level 6 forever, as far as the eye can see.

At this point the only thing I'd want is the title itself. Vampire: The Masquerade. Has sentimental value and it's rather to the point. I don't recall how prevalent 'This is a clone of X' or 'this is just copying off of Y' is in the world of tabletop gaming. Granted there's some to be said about the...

Now that'd be a kickass setup that brings about the moral ambiguity the game wants to have. Too bad nobody competent enough is ever going to get access to the rights to Vampire.

I'm a bit excited because it's doing more than most TTRPGs are doing nowadays and it's more Cyberpunk. But CP2020 is one of those RPGs I grew up with in the home so I'm slightly biased.

Lot of emphasis on fluff, which I find kind of odd. You'd think concept would be most important to start with, because without it you can't have coherent rules, fluff, or challenges.

I thought the role of Toreador was socialite/combat blender. Everyone who I've encountered who play Toreador play that way due to their power setup.

Honestly it feels like the 10's are going to be the era of lost rules. While more TTRPGs than ever are coming out, very few of them are well put together or well organized. Tussock is right in that it's all cargo cult. But I don't think anything's going to hit it big enough to break it. Unless I'm c...

Could you link me that? It'd be useful for the work I'm doing.

Well, I have to ask then, is there a thread on here documenting all the changes from 3.0 to 3.5? I'd look for it myself but I'm a tad busy.

Is it nostalgia if I'm still actively playing and modifying it with an IRL group of people who refuse to move on to another edition?

10 years ago: I used to think that the DM was absolute and ruled all, was completely unquestionable, and could basically do whatever the fuck they wanted because of rule 0. Characters could only be really competent within the last 5 levels of the game and all that. 5 years ago: I actually found The ...

Part 3: Race Gamers of the den, I welcome you, to choosing your race. Which you are supposed to do first in character creation but then you wouldn’t know how good or bad these bonuses are. This is one of those sections that’s big on fluff, so prepare yourselves for some Fantasy Racism™ and a bunch ...

Sorry to interrupt the discussion over high magic vs low magic and Tolkien and such. I’ve got more of this game to review. But for my two cents on the matter, it's the fact that just about everyone in the universe of Essos and whatever The Witcher calls its world are, at the end of the day, people. ...

Jesus, this is basically Cyberpunk 2020 so far. Ref and Int, BOD for survival, and botches on a 1 in combat leads to retarded shit like shooting yourself in the ass. Speaking as an amateur designer - do I need to develop the sad condition of being TOTALLY FUCKING UNABLE to learn from my mistakes in...

I'll talk about weapons more in-depth when we get to the actual full-blown weapons category, but for now there are silver weapons and non-silver weapons, and if you decide you hate yourself, you can use the optional meteorite weapon rule, where some monsters are only vulnerable to meteorite weapons ...

For published games, if you want a low fantasy RPG and don't mind the setting of Conan the Barbarian, then Conan d20 2e is pretty good fun. Got a lot of interesting published material, some of it is very experimental and super jank. If you don't mind insanity I recommend TOME D&D 3.5, which is l...

there seems to be 2 main ways that I think lead to successful item crafting systems. 1 - everything is a snowflake. monster entries specifically call out "you can totally harvest basilisk venom and it does X following normal poison rules". You have few that can be used for stuff and its f...

The costs look weird. Like, what what was the justification for chitin to be 106 or an arming sword to be 404, rather than something more round? ADDENDUM: What the hell is toxicity? The cost of an arming sword diagram. Diagrams are supposed to be of some rarity and importance as they're basically p...

Gear and Craftables I cast thread necromancy, which uses 25,000 GP worth of diamonds because I'm not actually a necromancer. The more I write this review the more I feel like I’m circling a drain, almost like I’m going down some sort of downward spiral and I just can’t stop. This section’s just a f...