The Gaming Den

Why is preventing large-scale changes to the setting a bad idea, exactly? 1. There are only so many extended RPG campaigns you can run or play in your lifetime. Particularly once you and all your circle of friends get demanding jobs, and doubly so if you're not the only GM in the company, so you ru...

I'm not sure why Cataclysm needs defending. It's the exact sort of thing you can expect to happen when there is a need to punish a ruler whose regime is quickly devolving into the direction worse than what gods of card-carrying Evil usually established when they had their chances to run parts of the...

pragma wrote:I was only able to see the races document at the link you shared, FatR. Am I doing something wrong?

No, more likely I did something wrong. The updated link should work now.

I don't think any of the statblocks provided so far deserve to be called "the worst". Saying that Elminster is not worth CR 27 doesn't meant much, if the whole CR system had disintegrated long before that point. I nominate writeups of iconic NPCs from 3E DMG. Tordek and the Chump Gang were...

I haven't posted here since forever, but that doesn't mean I haven't updated the game. Here's the link to the latest version: https://yadi.sk/d/EDAdisq63HWXjA No setting updates whatsoever, beyond what can be gleaned from monster descriptions, as I don't have much time at the present and the actual ...

Meh. 10 years ago this could have been relevant. Maybe if published instead of 3E this would have gotten anywhere. At this point it could only keep splintering the audiance which already is hopelessly splintered, because nearly all the remaining diehard fans probably play in their own versions of th...

Not particularly differently from 3.X early, though monsters have a bit less hit points at lower levels. But offense and defense (including both hit points and damage mitigation) scale much faster from about level 5-6, reflecting the overall sharper power curve (or, you can say, the power curve bala...

There are several classifications of magic in my heartbreaker. First, all the physics- and biology-defying powers the characters have are fueled by an explicit source, which is explained differently in-setting depending on to whom you're listening (there are arguments about whether energy to make im...

There's the Gods of Light from Dragonlance (Thank you for the reviews, Libertad, otherwise I wouldn't have that example) who backed the Kingpriest of Istar and allowed him to try to wipe out neutral-aligned faiths, try to wipe out arcane magic, and commit genocide. Insofar as I remember the setting...

I've switched to narrative timekeeping in my heartbreaker, because in my experience any duration bigger than rounds and smaller than a day/rest cycle means nothing else than "the effect ends when GM says so" anyway. I've tinkered about with the short-rest cycle as well, but in practice it ...

That said pathfinder 2E published AP appears to be an even worse disaster than the 2E game itself. Everybody says that the story is horrible, the encounters Unmemorable, and the story logic inane. Care to link any discussions? Paizo's own forum is carefully purged of negativity, as usual. Meanwhile...

The stealth minigame in my own heartbreaker has the stealthing party doing all the rolls against the highest passive perception value of the observing party. That said, before tackling any mechanical problems of stealth, game designers, not only that of Paizo, but even going back all the way to 3.0,...

If I was in charge of PF2, I'd simplify the game by getting rid of some outdated artifacts, like the complex number-fiddling with skills, and bonus types, as well as by cutting down on general crunch bloat by reducing the number of feats while combining existing ones, throwing shitty and useless spe...

Vampire romance has sucked dick since the beginning, though, because the writers couldn't decide where you are on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is playing a magically animated corpse who derives no pleasure from anything but bloodsucking, and 10 is an actual person who has to drink blood and sometime...

Also, the three standard playstyles for VtM were defined by players no later than the times of Revised: - Shotguns and katanas. - Bloodsuckers in the boardroom/Sim City by Night. - Vampire romance. The problem was, however, than no latter than these times the design team pretty much started actively...

Eh, those all are secondary problems. Deciding what character types you need and how you're intending to structure the typical game session come after you decide what your game is supposed to be about. Or at least they're supposed to, in practice, insofar as I can see, a lot of RPG writers just star...

Mouse Guard was the only game I've ever played or run that had literally non-functional rules, that is, rules which could produce a divide by zero situation naturally (it is possible for both sides to achieve win conditions in a conflict simultaneously, which is ok in a duel to death which authors c...

(1) To be fair Lago, the Exalted guy featured there has always been a card-carryng villain, and therefore we're not supposed to agree with him. Even though thanks to the way his world works he's basically 100% correct in this comic, just in a rude way. (2) There is a massive market worth of people w...

I've played some Exalted PBP and ran a couple of campaigns. That's why I'm still mad about it.

My own hearbreaker did away with strict timekeeping because tracking rounds/level was a waster of (real) time, and everything else ended whenever GM felt like so anyway. The remaining durations are concentration, 1 round, 1 scene (until the encounter ends and you get to catch a breath) and 1 day. Bu...

You more or less have to abandon grid measured in feet in meters once you have stuff like superspeed, teleport spam and tactical nukes on demand, or for that matter, breath-strafing dragons the size of a small castle, and what high-level fantasy on screen today doesn't have one or more of those? Ide...

There is an inherent problem with DnD math starting on "basically normal mortals" scale, while one of the main draws of the game is that eventually you proceed to fight a kitchen sink of ridiculous creatures from all across the fantasy, and the authors having no agreement of how exactly ri...

English translations of Chinese fantasy typically use the word "sect" to describe associations of non-blood-related practitioners of whatever gives the chosen few magic in their particular setting.

Gandalf sticks to swords and flashbangs because he can achieve more with less. Gandalf sticks to swords and flashbangs because he abstains from ever using magic to directly kill or mind control weaker orders of beings. There is no reason to assume that there is a physical, instead of a ethical limi...

Even in Tolkien there are people who can slice rocks and dance so hard that walls fall down and sing trees out of the ground and shit. And there are plenty of East Asian stories where the limits of mundane characters are pretty strictly enforced. And indeed, lots of East Asian stories where Magic D...