The Gaming Den

Yeah, but 4e actually had a shitload of fiddly stuff to track. The Conditions were pretty out-of-control. 5e actually is easy and simple. I don't like that, but others do. Nobody wanted to deal with trying to bring 45 archers into the ruined dwarven city. That's because they've been playing 3e and 4...

I didn't want to wait for Frank to post before contributing my own take. Troupe play is a good way to divvy up GMing responsibility, forestalling burnout, as well as allow less-skilled GMs a small arena in which to try some shit out and get some experience. Typically we divvied up responsibilities t...

Twitch play need not be completely divorced from TTRPGs.

Games like Jab are card games, but ultimately that card game is a resolution mechanic. It's entirely conceivable to create a real-time card resolution system that replaces combat dice-rolling.

The OGL cost Hasbro only in the switch to 4e and partial player-base reversion to Pathfinder, but that was reason enough. They're competing against what is essentially their own product, and what they're doing is driven by smart business - I'm sure they have more data than we do on this. Without the...

Speaking about DnD5e with my gaming group this evening, there's a strong liking of the simplicity: the Adv/Dis system is well-regarded and they actively disliked 3e's compounding of (and more to the point, tracking of) a ton of fiddly bonuses. I know that the Den - and I - tend to appreciate more gr...

Doubling back a bit, you're right on quarten/melancholic, tertian/choleric. Which is kind of sad and informative (regarding the game, and myself personally I suppose :P), because I poked through the internet a shitload on this because I thought your presentation was wrong, and after reading the firs...

The issue with Quartan Fever is that malaria is generalized at the time as the Ague, and basically means "fever"... and that the recurrence of the fever is its defining characteristic, but the recurrence rate determined the flavor of Ague/malaria. Once-every-four days fever (72h dormancy) ...

Agreed. EotE, as a book, is a complete RPG and it's expensive but it's okay. In the context of EotE/AoR/FaB it's off-putting, but standalone it's okay. AoR and the Jedi expansion should be short add-on books. Maybe they should've made a Star Wars core engine book and sold AoR/EotE/FaB as setting exp...

Warping is Realm specific - Magic Warping is different from Divine Warping is different from Faerie Warping is different from Infernal Warping. Not only that, but being attuned to a Realm means that you don't Warp from exposure to an ongoing environmental Aura, so Magi don't turn into chaos mutants ...

I feel like Welsh is always attempting to summon Cthulhu.

I figure the accounting exercises required for Great Power are more bug than feature, but they do mimic some academia pissing contests, and it all forms an inescapable part of ArM which does create stories. You basically want to steal grad students lab aides from each other so that they can run your...

EotE is a brutal money-grab. The books are expensive, the game uses unique dice that are sold at a premium, the GM and the players both need them, and pretty much all of the settings - EotE, AoR, whatever the Jedi one is - all use universal mechanics with the only new thing being the player backgrou...

Eh. I always felt the Profession skill was a pretty good kludge in 3e.

Backgrounds are indeed a great feature of 5e.

The species thing is sadly fiddly and gets its own full writeup in Houses of Hermes: Societates . Basically species are being emitted by things, and organs work by interacting with the species: An object exists, and sheds species. The species travel through a medium. The species strike an organ of p...

One of the central conceits of the game is that magi have an aura that unnerves people. If you have “The Gift,” you can learn magic and cast spells and be awesome, but people intrinsically dislike you. This is presented as one of the big reasons that Wizards hide away in their towers and let mundan...

I thought the economy/lab building stuff was basically down time? As in, you all "do stuff" throughout a season, possibly coming across as individual episodes that cover random crap, and then at the end of the season everyone says "Oh yeah and I was working on _______", meaning ...

... It's a solution, but I'm not surprised that more people haven't thought of it. It requires people to completely rethink how they view their narrative relationship to TTRPGs as they're played. Blood and Honor by John Wick has an interesting approach to the players/characters/narrative relationsh...

If I have the time, I create a list of setting must-haves, then use that to frame a system's cosmology, then foundational creation story, then theological interpretations, then cultural interpretations. The process usually affords a solid principles-first approach to settings that's abstract enough ...

I don't think Kaelik is being generous enough - some degree of GM adjudication is a reasonable backstop to rules implementation - but just look at the rules procedure you outlined: it's spread across three chapters and requires you to infer some stuff and discard some other stuff, all of which is ba...

Well, unless I miss my guess, it looks like the guys that were supposed to be doing D&D's digital thingamajig - and then promptly canceled - are going to be telling their side of the story in a way that doesn't technically breach their NDA: http://www.trapdoortechnologies.com/morningstar/ This ...

Bingo.

The official seal of approval is a bigass deal with RPGs.

If you have a DM who acts like this, he's a bad DM, and the players won't have fun, and the group won't stay together past three sessions. And, importantly, there does not exist a set of TTRPG rules than make a bad DM fun to play with. Modern tabletop games seem to rely more on having a generally a...

I was perusing the DnD5e PHB this morning and, honestly, didn't run into much that I thought was awful. The game looked generic, and that's unfortunate, but nothing made me roll my eyes. If someone asked me its greatest sin, I'd say that it looks like 3e with less moving parts. That doesn't sound li...

That reminds me of the game I was once in where the Weekly World News was the only reliable non-compromised media outlet in the world. Men in Black? I know it is a scene in the movie, where Tommmy Lee Jones' character buys all the tabloids to find the scoop on an arms deal. I also believe there was...

That reminds me of the game I was once in where the Weekly World News was the only reliable non-compromised media outlet in the world.