The Gaming Den

Word of the Line Editor is that Total Klutz + Daredevil lets you reroll a critical failure ONCE, and the second time you fail that roll, you're hosed. With gun combat, that means you're risking falling on your face a lot when you're dodging enemy attacks, and possibly having your weapons jam. I woul...

It's been a while since I played, but I remember Contingent/Quickcast (whichever lets you stack two targeted spells in the same slot) of Assay Resistance + Bane (whichever applies save throw penalties) followed by Finger of Death spam was remarkably efficient at anti-climatically killing dragons.

So I'm still relatively new to Dominions 4, and for whatever reason I've decided to play MA Themiskyra. And I thought I'd get some advice on several issues: * Pretender Design, Magic Paths Themiskyra has lots of sacred troops, so it seems that a Pretender with a 1-3 paths at a high level would be re...

Heavy Gear: Why the fuck did I think I needed a second rpg about playing a big robot suit pilot, especially since this game has all the same fucking issues as mechwarrior. Care to clarify here? Heavy Gear has plenty of issues, and they generally got worse with each successive game in the Silhouette...

First things first, Tussock is always wrong. Gygax is actually talking about OD&D not AD&D. While that's true about that quote, he repeats the point in the AD&D DMG: "One of the things stressed in the original game of D&D was the importance of recording game time with respect t...

Classic Car Wars and Duel Track are pretty much all you want or need to play Car Wars Mad Max edition, and are available from SJ Games as PDFs: http://w23.sjgames.com/products/car-wars-classic-1 and http://w23.sjgames.com/products/dueltrack for $14.

I've played about 30-40 sessions of Savage Worlds, on both the player's and the DM's side of the table. Tossing cards around a table for initiative isn't particularly fast, but it doesn't slow down play very much either. I've also done some chase scenes with Savage Worlds. You can make them exciting...

Except they totally had jets and flying mechs that could go supersonic. There was no good reasons offered why areas were not well surveilled. Space flight was ruled out due to possible orbital weapons and enough space debris that would just tear things to bits. Mutants in Orbit or some later book p...

On the design viewpoint, I was very annoyed that the last 4 adventures of the Path didn't have any advice on "what to do if your PCs don't want to make pacts with demons?" I'm buying adventures because I don't have the time and inclination to make all this stuff up, and hopefully because t...

All I know about Germany in Shadowrun comes from the DLC for the recent computer game. Berlin is apparently some kind of semi-anarchist "Flux State" which you're supposed to support as the PC, even though there's no real reason to do so. At least until 2055 or so, when the dragon Lofwyr se...

I've used roll20.net a couple of times as have some of my friends. The interface can be a litttle annoying, in that a wrong click can undo a great deal of work. It's also a little clunky if you're coming from MapTools. Still, we could play the game and stuff. Supposedly, roll20.net is friendlier to ...

Yeah, Wesnoth makes you constantly second guess whether you really suck or whether those casualties are mostly just the cost of doing business. I doubt your'e supposed to feel confident while playing it. Back when I was playing it actively, the Wesnoth designer wanted there to be a constant tension...

The first 5-7 adventures of Savage Tide make for a decent narrative arc: the PCs work for Lavania, travel to the Isle of Dread, save Farshore from Vanthus, and possibly destroy the Savage Tide production facilities and stockpiles. If you deliberately underlevel the PCs a bit, the lousy optimization ...

Do you think it is time to do away with class racial abilities to scores and do something more holistic like, pick a physical and a mental, pick 2 physical, pick 2 mental, etc? My group had a house rule that every PC got an another +2 racial bonus to a stat of their choice. It meant that everyone w...

The mechanical core of 3e and 4e is decent, if not great: roll 1d20 + bonuses versus a target number to check for success. In combat, you act in order of descending fixed initiative, and on your turn you a standard action, a move action, and a minor action, with the ability to trade the standard for...

My copy of the AP puts this as Scenario 8, not 7, and Serpents of Shuttlecove, not Into the Maw. (Fixed, thanks!)

SoS continues the trend of being insanely wordy and not very good. The sad thing is that it's still one of the better APs and I don't really think anything Paizo has done since is better.

I have mixed feelings about CoBI. It's an expansion of the original Taboo Island from X1: Isle of Dread, and I have some fond memories of that little dungeon. Turning a bunch of ordinary primitive tribesmen into fiendish creeps is a little odd, but it's perhaps the inevitable result of the power cre...

I haven't run Tides of Dread, though it really is my favorite part of the adventure. From reading the Paizo forums, it seems that Vanthus tends to get defeated quickly and easily, but that's somewhat counterbalanced by the gauntlets of yuan-ti wizards and vrocks that the PCs have to run through to g...

The paizo forums are gaga over HTBM, fapping over how scary and creepy the bar-lgura tricks are. It's the kind of thing that makes me despair over the Paizo forums, since Hercules and Jason and the Argonauts and other 7th-9th level characters are not scared by this kind of low grade demon bullshit. ...

I actually like Sea Wyvern's Wake quite a bit, but then again I'm running it in GURPS which has different magic power levels. So I adapted it pretty heavily and got rid of a lot of the bullshit. The first point of bullshitness is that the Sea Wyvern travels at 24 miles/day. It moves through 3 mi/hr ...

Your bedroom is 25' by 45' with a 10' by 25' annex? 1375 square feet? That's a reasonable 2-3 bedroom house. How big is your house overall?

As for the Bullywug Gambit, I think you're a bit insane for going room by room in these reasonably large dungeons, but the effort is appreciated. The rescue mission in the latter half of BG works fairly well in play and is, as you noted, reasonably well written. It's clearly intended for unoptimized...

Maybe our GM was making stuff up as he went along, but our party had barely any interaction with The Jade Ravens at all (although they did inspire us to name ourselves The Millennium Falcons). In the end, I think some or all of them died with no help from us, but they were so unmemorable that I for...

I wanted to run Tides of Dread for my group, but we lost interest in the game / my work schedule interfered, I forgot which. Sea Wyvern's Wake and Tides of Dread are definitely some of the better parts of the AP. Bullywug Gambit isn't too bad. I ran a heavily edited version of it (in GURPS) so I can...

I'm also a fan of Savage Tides. The quality of the adventures are fairly uneven and you have to pull a lot of the bullshit D&D3e encounters apart and rewrite them, but there's plenty of good stuff to loot. I haven't run the full path and never would, but I did run Bullywug Gambit, Sea Wyvern's W...