The Gaming Den

"Better" rules for shotguns could really be as simple as "divide Called Shot, Small Target and Mini Target modifiers by two" and "characters grappling or grappled by the target get hit too." That's simple and sensible and makes shotguns useful for hunting small game. O...

So as my group has been running some playtests for the eventual adaption of Shadowrun 4A + alt.War + EotM + house rules, we've hit a couple of things that are confused. Astral Ambushes : So unbound spirits and bound spirits providing services hang out on the astral plane, within a few hundred meters...

So my players started in a GURPS group, so they're used to fiddly. Shadowrun is a little too fiddly at points (and much to fiddly at some points, nobody wants to play a rigger because they don't want to outfit 5 drones dear god) so we're trying to eliminate some of this stuff. Right now, we're stick...

So one of the first things I did in my house rules was merge Strength and Body into one stat, called Body. And then I merged all the weapon skills in Ranged Combat, Close Combat, and Dodge and made that the Combat skill group. It seems to make the Street Samurai a lot more effective - it's not hard ...

I would appreciate the specifics of how you're handling burst fire and recoil compensators. Currently, I'm doing this, which is basically alt.War + standard Shadowrun recoil rules. RECOIL A weapon's Recoil attribute is the character Body required to use it normally. Using a weapon with a higher Reco...

I think the thing I'm most interested in how you handle Recoil. I have some house rules based on alt.War but they're kind of meh and probably stick too close to the original rules. I'd like to see another version.

I want to do an example of play, and would appreciate someone checking my work. "Hotrod" is a newbie Shadowrunner. Relevant stats are Reaction 5, Intuition 4, Logic 5 (7), Willpower/Edge 3. Skills include Cracking 4, EW 6, Electronics 4, Perception 3. He a specialization in Hacking (Exploi...

JesterZero, did you ever post your collection of house rules as a PDF somewhere? I couldn't find anything on a naive search via google.

There is, since the RNG is a single d20 and units cap at 400. What half-assed justification do they provide for capping unit size at an understrength battalion? Even a Roman cohort had more guys than that, and a cohort was a pretty small unit in terms of battlefield deployment. I get that the histo...

Dream Pod 9's Jovian Chronicles are a pastiche of Gundam, and humans have a presence in orbit around every planet from Mercury to Jupiter. There's at least some stuff on Saturn and the outer planets, too. There's at least a couple of pages of detail on every one of them. SJ Games' Transhuman Space i...

It looks fucking awful is what it looks like. As a moderately skilled mini painter, I look at that and think "I fucking don't want to paint that." The little jewels, sandwiched between the multiple layers of unconvincing floaty shit? Those are going to be a bitch and half to reach with br...

I found it a fun enough game, but unless you're a huge fan of oWoD, it's probably not worth getting a group together. The basic set is incomplete for the reasons that Frank notes, and things get really weird as you add more expansions.

Also I enjoy the little fuckups: By critical hits only doubling the DICE you roll and not your damage, it removed crit building as a viable choice for non-spellcasters, whilst making critical hits matter more ONLY for spellcasters. Our group's assassin seemed to be quite happy with rolling a huge h...

Less simplified, each vehicle has an armor rating. An attack that does less damage than the armor rating has no effect, more than the armor rating is light damage (and -1 to armor rating), 2x the armor rating is heavy damage (and -2 to armor rating), 3x the armor rating is overkill. I've played hund...

How do you envision combat to look in this game, how many people will be involved and what actions will they be taking to resolve it? Small squad based combat mostly. Vying for superior tactical positioning. Ranged, melee and tech attacks. I'd like to accomplish this without the need of a battlemat...

Have you looked at DP9's Heavy Gear? It's not a perfect system, but it plays fairly fast and could be strip mined for ideas. How big are the mecha in your games? Heavy Gears are roughly 5 meters tall and powered by gasoline engines. I've run games with similar sized vehicles and claimed the mecha we...

I'd just give them a list of options that look fairly balanced to you and let them choose from a list. ie, their base ship is a YT-1300 with a crew of 2, 10 passengers, 100 tons cargo, speed 12, and armor +14. Extra armor plating is +10 armor, -2 speed, -20 cargo. Faster engines are +4 speed, -10 ca...

"Jacksonian" might be it. Would anyone remember whether the first GURPS game had a neutral tone or did it lean towards either the GM or the players? (while Champions was a revolution back in the day with both point-buy and inventing Effects-Orientation, the writing's tone was infuriatingl...

Sure you'd get the odd incident of (intermittent) enforcement of "wait, maybe you need a holy symbol for that one" or that one time someone actually remembers that resurrection is supposed to require a pile of diamonds or something rite? Does anyone remember? Well OK I suppose we didn't c...

I think I'd downplay the threat of death if any of your many masters got the impression you were disloyal, because that's going to happen a lot. It seems like two key parts of game play are going to be persuading various masters that you had no choice but to do something they didn't like (because ob...

You need to provide some evidence for your assertion that a big chart and fixed skills can't work together. ...rolling on a big chart that my character's profession is Investigator and he has the Diplomancy, Search, Interrogation, and Pistol skills. The issue is that you'll eventually roll on a big...

You need to provide some evidence for your assertion that a big chart and fixed skills can't work together. I don't see what the difference is between deciding to play an Investigator agent with Diplomacy, Search, Interrogation, and Pistol skills (which leaves me out of magical investigation and mec...

What kind of adventure? A murder mystery is different than raiding a tomb is different than hexcrawl exploration. You need to cover all possibilities than you don't think you can cover by improvising, but you only need to cover the possibilities that the PCs are likely to encounter in the next sessi...

There's always a tension, when releasing new product, between attracting new customers and alienating old ones. If the current customer base is too small, it's more profitable to alienate the current customers and replace them with new ones. If your customer base are people who think, "the prod...

I'm surprised that the DMG outsells the MM by 3 to 1. If that holds even roughly true outside of Amazon, who are all the people who buy the first but not the second? Magic Items are in the DMG, so it can be useful to players. There's even a small beastiary for your summons. I suspect that players b...