The Gaming Den

Because my brain is extremely small, until I read Iduno's post I totally forgot. GM as storywriter: This could be an axis all on its own. Combining it with other categories is demonstrative. Viking Hat GMs end up being the frustrated novelist type, for whom the rules of the game are an impediment. G...

Following on from the tradition of D&D, most games have a role analogous to the Dungeon Master. It might be called something else (MC, GM, Storyteller, Referee, etc.) but the idea that one person at the table has a special role in the running of the game is common. What varies is exactly how muc...

Iduno wrote:Yes, but not in the way you want. You can play where you don't have a stat block, and only succeed when the GM's story (which he bought from Paizo) says you're allowed to.

And you still have to roll at about 50/50 odds if you're anything but optimal - can't have you critically succeed, now can we?

It sounds an awful lot like that PC would be able to impact a railroad in some way, so that's a no from me dawg. This is PF2e, we can't have that.

The one absolute good thing about 5e is that it has brought a lot of people to the hobby that were previously turned off by the toxic elements of the player base. This is variously attributable to 5e's progressive social attitudes, and the fact that it's extremely light rules facilitate more social...

Lost Omens: Legends. Of course, reviewers at Paizo are lapping it up, despite it being obvious 5e-tier non-game shovelware. If and when these characters need stats, we will be providing them for the stories we want to tell. There it is again. Like at the end of Bulmahn's awful post on the playtest, ...

The cans of energy drink vanish after a certain point, to be replaced with... beer? At least it's an in-universe product that you had a hand in bringing about, but it's a bit odd for a stamina buffing item.

In regards to Pokémon's popularity, it should be noted it is literally the second biggest IP in the world, next to Hello Kitty, which is largest brand in the world. So the event better question is: why isn't there a Hello Kitty ttrpg? On the off chance you're not being facetious, I bet that Venn di...

Resonance is out, untrained no longer adds level, trained+ add more than +1 per tier, monster maths is a bit fixed. That's about it.

Pokemon is an IP that people have a lot of emotional investment in, more than almost anything except maybe Harry Potter. After all, if the gameplay is even passable people will excuse all sorts of other faults such as cutting well-loved mechanics, excessive hand-holding, or even the culling of the m...

Oh, you're using D&D5? You'd really be better of switching to a system with more meat to it to pull off the sort of things you're looking to do here. Advantage/disadvantage is a passable ad-hoc adjudication method, but like a lot of rules light games it ends up being "you can do anything&qu...

Who was it that said that the future of D&D was slapping licenses on whatever came within arm's reach? I swear someone did.

Having been playing it myself, I've found it quite zen a lot of the time. Making deliveries in a desolate setting could be dull, but the encumbrance simulation aspects of it have made it an enjoyable challenge. The social aspects of the game are neat - a Souls-alike asymmetric multiplayer, but purel...

Thanks all, good pointers. I think it's partially come from an inaccurate description of the game to the purchaser by a friend of ours. Said friend claimed "there's as much RP in Gloomhaven as you bring to it", which... I mean, that's patently ridiculous on the face of it. I can RP as a ro...

Background: I've got a group of very dear real-life friends that are into board games and to a lesser extent TTRPGs. Now, I don't actually play TTRPGs with them as they seem mainly to want to play D&D 5th, and I prefer no RPG to bad RPG. People seem to believe that I dislike it because it's rule...

What even is the point of 3.X, if the only interesting thing to do with it is exploit its flaws to subvert its expectations? Playing a homebrewed version of it is still the best D&D experience you can get, almost two decades on. And until there's an industry-wide paradigm shift of the audience ...

I really don't know what Paizo thinks they're doing. They must be stuck in some sort of feedback loop with their sycophants (having banned everyone else) to be unable to see the colossal, looming issues at the core of PF2. Maybe they got it into their head that it was their work on PF1 that got them...

Class balance is not a problem of PF2. They're all boringly mediocre. And when everyone's super boringly mediocre... no-one will be. The swashbuckler has to move around or at least use feints to use the abilities which let it fight effectively. Kudos for that, but it's a mess of abilities which req...

If you can't tell I'm just reading their post and don't have a copy of the playtest yet. It was announced October 9th and ends December 2nd 2019, and the APG has a release date of July 2020. I'm just filled with confidence for this. A "playtest" for a TTRPG supplement that lasts only 54 d...

If Paizo's smart, they'll hire some prominent voice actor or someone with "nerd cred" to run flashy railroaded games with high production values and put it on Youtube. If they're really smart, they'll make a new channel for it so that people don't automatically associate it with corporate...

If you want to implement a wound penalty system, you need to avoid death spirals on the PC end at the very least. Death spirals may be interesting to watch in a narrative - see any story where the final fight is between two exhausted, unarmed, depowered people - but to play they are godawful. Any sy...

Seems that this game is totally dead on arrival. The Pathfinder subreddit barely discusses it, for one, and cursory looks at RPGnet or GitP reveal no discussion. For another, the Amazon listing has it behind a few "LitRPG" e-books, various Minecraft and Nintendo books at #42 in it's catego...

Biiig post by Jason Buhlman, thought it was worth a breakdown. Simply iterating on the same game engine was not enough. The 3.5 engine has had its day, and as a team we decided that it was time to modernize, to create a version of Pathfinder that was more than just tinkering around the edges. The g...

Anything worth scavenging from PbtA games is already present in better games, and anything unique to PbtA is shit.

This is a weird argument. RAW doesn't cause lazy writing, lazy writers cause lazy writing. Sure you could argue that as long as players are willing to buy and patch shoddily produced products we'll keep getting them, but that's like saying "as long as people keep eating mcdonalds no other rest...