The Gaming Den

To be honest C:tL best feature is probably introducing the fey as antagonists. Psychotic elves who live in a dreamland whose morals are so far removed from ours they might as well not have any and are very powerful in our world and practically gods in theirs? Sweet. Now if only DnD elves were like ...

It goes beyond just powergaming. Some people, such as myself, get off on being able to be a Sacred Fist Knight of the Rose after starting their life as a fighter/cleric and having a magic ring that they talk to and ask for advice. Not just for powergaming, mind, but because it helps us fully realiz...

But even rpg.net, which doesn't specialize in D&D, has been taking repeated ninja kicks to the nuts. They went down from about a .006 reach to a .004. In layman's terms, they lost about a third of their visitors. No wonder. Rpg.net very much promotes "newer is better" policy, whether ...

The themes of getting dicked over by elders and living in a terrible world have been in the game since 1st edition Vampire. I don't think anyone really is going to actually complain about that since this is the World of Darkness. Indeed, I have noticed nothing in aWoD so far that is not, rather, pe...

C:tL has no redeeming features. It is the same old "your character should suffer before the might of the Storyteller - through living in a world without any nice spots or good sides, being oppressed (hunted, in C:tL case) by all-powerful elders and being fucked right in the ass by Morality stat...

Except you seem to be arguing that 3.5 is playable in such a way without being a disaster. In which case, any house rules mean you point at it and say "I need this house rule in order for it not to be a disaster." Attacking the weak points of an argument is just how one argues. Banning tw...

I actually read an article by a 'veteran' competitive tournament player who deliberately gimped his army, giving the justification that otherwise, he'd get shafted in construction and sportsmanship. Seriously, what the flying fuck? Those guys fellate the Oberoni Fallacy, the Stormwind Fallacy and r...

Elves in my world have naturally low birth rate, which, for most of them, is reduced much further by due to combination of magical advances in birth control, and enlightened society that provides care for elderly and infirm. Also, elf enclaves generally run on magic left by their high-level ancestor...

I don't like FR very much (totally disconnected from mechanics, writers have no sense of scale, etc, etc, all the usual flaws, but turned to eleven), but its previous versions had their charm and their strong points. Lore accumulated through several editions and the Byzantine web of secret wars betw...

Redwall recycles plots and is largely about stabbing Evil in the face (in surprisingly violent, for a children book, ways). Not so different from an average fantasy novel, in other words, except for talking animals . I still remember the first few books fondly, but later it went downhill.

In my experience, DnD as a whole loses traction. My favorite non-English gaming forum is nearly dead ever since 4E-related flamewars were stomped out by the moderator. Since bashing of 4E was expressly forbidden, there is just nothing new to talk about anymore, and 4E crowd is seriously like 5-6 peo...

Doesn't the old DMG have breakdowns of how many high-level characters are in a given settlement? Those should be enough to keep the general monster riff-raff at bay. Yes, but unfortunately, these breakdowns are insane and no less harmful to the verisimilitude than the question of why monsters hadn'...

Unintilligent brutes can be fairly easily taken out by crowds of armed hunters, unless they are purple worm-level strong or above. Same goes for intelligent brutes, in the end, although they would be significantly better at avoiding disadvantageous fights or cowing humanoids into submission. Mantico...

Well, I'm the other way; I like Eberron-style extremely distant and uncaring (possibly non-existent) gods. Then you have easy answers to questions like "Why doesn't god X send a couple of solars down to kick bad guy Y's ass?" (Which usually ends in vague muttering about balances of power,...

Speaking from total ignorance of the setting: Are the gods on a geologic time scale? Like, maybe they did a lot of stuff a long time ago and now 10k years is a bullshit distraction blink-of-an-eye? That would have been a good explanation, but no. Several of them are (relatively) recently ascended m...

I'm actually kind of offended. What offends me about Pathfinder gods is the fact that they are completely fucking irrelevant, due to being completely passive for about the entire history of the setting. When FR gods randomly screw with the mortal world, it is generally annoying, but at least demons...

I do not see how 4E tactical combat is any improvement over 3.5. Options that totally suck (due to low chance of success or just not doing anything important) are not options and in 4E you generally have only one option that does not totally suck and can be used more than once per encounter. And you...

Psychic Robot wrote: Death, No Save, which doesn't really happen in 3e.

Yeah. Taking AoW as an example even obvious traps which any party that bothers to look at all can recognize don't instakill you there. Even if logically they should.

I mentioned that, but I feel that high difficulty (relatively high - twinked full casters still can rape AoW) is not so much a bug as a feature. If I'm ever going to run it for a non-optimizer party, I'll likely grant PCs some perks, such as ability to pick some "powerful" races and templa...

As already have been mentioned, there are 3.5 adventure paths from Paizo, three from the Dungeon magazines and three published separately. Age of Worms and Rise of the Runelords are very good, Savage Tide and Curse of the Scarlet Throne are quite good, Second Darkness, Shattered City and currently-o...

Cool, let me try to home in a bit better on what would be a good fit for that. So, when you say subgame, are you looking for something that offers different tactical choices with different mechanical impact (for example, lying gives you a bonus to a certain roll, but is countered with fact-finding)...

I have been going to a weekly gaming meet up most weeks for a few years. We usually play one-shots or short campaigns of new games, and thus play an entirely new system about once a month. Sometimes it's a well-polished game. Sometimes it's a playtest draft that isn't very good. Most of the time th...

"Putting together a sub-game that works within pre-defined and very tight premises" is not "succeeding", so stop pretending that you actually have this "laundry list".

Burning Wheel I put into category of social mechanics that blow. Not that I care about the rest of the game. And Carnage Across the Stars seems to be stereotypical single-note indie shit.

The problem is that it's not compared to what you usually see in Fantasy Literature, it's being compared to what you see in Warhammer Fantasy - which is a specific world. And more importantly, it's the specific world that the game happens to take place in. I cannot say for Warhammer Fantasy, becaus...