The Gaming Den

I bought 3e the first day it came out. I liked it then, I am not so big on it now. I tried Owod, Nwod, exalted, silohouette, gurps, and numerous others. What I liked about 3e was that it was easy to play out of the box. The combat was closer to working than any other game. The other minigames sort o...

PO: Spells and Magic was not a bad suppliment either. Honestly, playing D&D with the channneling magic system for arcane casters and the "divine boon" system for clerics/druids was actually pretty awesome. I recall playing in a campaign in which a player set pretty much all of his cha...

1. Ensure that no role is necessary. If you want to play a party of strikers, you should be able to do so competently. That means that you're going to dish out enough damage to take down monsters quickly, but you're going to get hit more often and there's a good chance that you're going to get knoc...

So, there are rules in there that are neither 3.0 or 3.5? I don't actually own any of those books. The thing with the books produced in the itarim was not that they have rules that are in neither 3.0 or 3.5 but they reference the rules in ways that don't make sense in EITHER 3.0 or 3.5. Basically, ...

Yurtle the Turtle is a clear call to action against the forces of Fascism. But Lord of the Rings really isn't. If you announced that Sauron was Stalin and Gondor was Germany, the metaphor would work just as well, maybe better than its intended reading that Gondor was England and Sauron was Hitler. ...

All of the WoD systems break when a reasonably creative person hits them. I mean, in Vampire the most newbie of vampires can assemble a literal army of blood-bonded special forces guys to demo elder vampires and their havens, and the most hardcore vampire can't survive a sniper bullet to the head o...

Did they revise the forgotten realms campaign setting for 3.5? I thought they did because I know I had to buy it twice for some reason and thats the only thing that makes sense now. Eitherway, all of the books that were published in the 4-6 months before 3.5 came out are the ones I hate. The fiend f...

"Core" was never meant to become this magical sacred descriptor that somehow meant "more balanced" or "the way the game is supposed to be played" It was only supposed to indicate the minimum materials neccessary to make the additional suppliments function. Everybody ass...

In 4E D&D classes are designed under the assumption that there is a perfect master race to fill them, so this is a non-starter. Every race except humans and half elves have a class which they synergize best with. However, You really don't need to be the "best race" to make an effectiv...

Yeah, I think 4E just tries to create new stuff for the sake of creating new stuff. The dragonborn and tieflings especially annoyed me, since they expected every campaign world to adopt them just for 4E, for god knows what reason. And naturally everyone in the world just knows they're a PC race and...

Umm, All the people talking about risk realize that the key strategy to winning risk is to have as close to the last turn as possible and to get involved in as few conflicts with other players as possible? I mean honestly, whatever shaky ass meant to be broken table alliances form will determine the...

As a caveat to what frank is saying also remember that what he is describing is then turned around and used AS THE MAJOR SELLING POINT OF THE GAME. The "magic system limited only by your imagination" is really cool but what they were really selling were $40 hard bound coppies of "powe...

Civ is an incredibly shitty example for this, because literally the entire point of the game is to make your empire look the way you want it to. This is like complaining about imbalances in Sim City or some shit. Things that make your population spike or whatever are not necessarily even desirable ...

So Frank, if I want to play MtA but in a not-totally-broken way, can this be done? I'm not Frank, but, well, obviously you can, because quite a lot of people did (and probably still do) that. I dispute that. I have never heard of someone playing a non-broken game of Mage. Enjoyable yes. Non-broken,...

Boolean: The problem with old mage is that paradox is based on reality as we know it because its what most sleepers believe. The more sleepers who view something the more paradox it creates. Even in a place where nobody can actually see its better to try and stick to reality as believed than to actu...

You should very quickly acertain how these people play. OWOD is totally gm fiat driven anyway. Its rules don't work or generate anything like consistant results just run raw. However, this appears to be author's intent as this somehow makes the game awesome for storytelling mode. Really, all that ph...

I think it'd be sweet if TWF just gave you an extra chance. You roll two dice to hit and if either hits, you hit with one of your weapons. Generally speaking, it's easier to hit somebody at all if you have two weapons, but it's a lot harder to hit somebody with both weapons in the timespan it takes...

It depends on what you mean by balance and what sort of game you are playing. Any game where all sides are supposedly equal people care. I mean if you were playing chess and white got to start with all the pawns as queens there would be pretty heavy QQ. In wargames and strategy games its a little di...

There is one other thing I would like to point out. While I do like the D&D action system because it is easy to gamemaster its not actually the "lumped" actions system that I think is the best or gold standard. Zine: if your building a game and actually want something that functions at...

Murtak The system you are talking about and the ones in the sample games discussed in the opening thread are not really similar. Look at what the original post says. Don't stop reading till the ideas are finished: I refer to the "Action Points" used in games such as Space Hulk, Jagged Alli...

Why not? Ok, did you not read the initial post? In games like spacehulk you get all your action points at once. You spend your action points till you have 0 then the next person gets his turn. The system in Fung Shuei and Exalted and I think DP9 also uses the ticking initiative stuff. That is a coo...

Keep in mind that while the X-Com games used APs, the attacks were actually a percentage of your total APs, so AP were really mostly used for things like movement and drawing weapons. Having more AP in one of those games didn't mean you got a ton of shots, it just meant you could move faster. Again...

3) Characters should have AP, but it might be better if monsters don't so the DM doesn't go insane. I agree, albeit I was thinking of monsters that still have AP so that we don't have a 4E-like disconnect between monsters and the rest of the universe. Maybe monsters could simply have a specific &qu...

Murtak, I actually like that system however that is not really an action point system. Thats basically the core idea of exalted 2e action resolution system. Floating initiative and action cost systems do work on pen and paper. However, I will say again that it works best when all players (including ...

The main issue with actions points is bookkeeping. Fallout really set a gold standard for a game where tatical actionpoints are used. However, that system as pen and paper blows hardcore. When the computer manages the bookkeeping action points are a fine idea. However, all the headaces that go along...