The Gaming Den

Some ideas for random curses to throw at the players: http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=51478

Or, at the very least, a repository of good refutations that we can paste for people instead of just dismissing them as newbies.

I had a GURPS campaign that I greatly enjoyed. Started off in 3e and eventually switched to 4e. Having a highly experienced GM helped, as did setting the dials to "DND", but the system was definitely one of the reasons the game worked as well as it did.

Just being a programmer won't get you anywhere; as OgreBattle says, there are code monkeys all over the world. The trick is to have some special skill that lets take jobs that a bog-standard programmer just couldn't handle. For example, having dual citizenship and being willing to relocate constantl...

I'll put in another vote for GURPS. A lot of the balance has to come from the DM outlawing chunks of the system, but at least it kind of works.

I've been working on this theory for a while. Looks like it's come up again. Tell me how well I've generalized here and if the generalization is useful. Successfully solving a problem is fun. More difficult problems yield more rewarding solutions. Creating a game, then, starts with convincing player...

I'll take a stab at a DND-style example, then, even though it will also have problems. Say you want to craft a +2 sword with the Flaming and Dancing enchantments on it. Instead of just learning Fireball and Animate Objects and then dumping the required money into the item during downtime, you might ...

Stealing from the combat system always works. Making an item could literally include summoning and trapping an elemental or something, while stopping it from destroying your tools and lab assistants, and then finding some unwilling high-level Fighter to stab to death with the partly-enchanted blade...

I think that part of the problem is that this is really a gradient rather than a sharp decision, kind of like the whole "nature versus nurture" debate. Few settings are entirely MAT or entirely MASS. Instead, you have settings where direct magic use is MASS but magic-users can produce MAT ...

No game-mechanical suggestions, but one aside - this sounds like a recent anime called Sword Art Online. It's worth watching if you're into anime.

Smart spells. It's one thing to cast a fireball at a target. It's quite another to evoke a series of fireballs that fly around in a grid pattern until they find a target, at which point they all home in and detonate. Kind of like minionmancy, but with spell stats instead of monster stat blocks. I s...

I like the idea with half of the 7 being local and half being community. As you mention, it adds new and interesting things for the players to do. Instead of news communities being geographical, though, how about tying them to major intenet communities? I can't remember if we decided if the internet...

I like this idea. The whole idea of having multiple chunks of game state running on different time frames to model different bits of the world - news, markets, combat, investigation - could be really interesting. (At least, I assume that's what this is going to end up looking like - every ongoing ac...

I hope nobody minds if I rant for a while.[hr]I know exactly what our goal here is. Our goal is to have fun. Character Optimization is fun in the same way that Sudoku is fun - it's complex problem-solving with a set of well-defined constraints and a wide range of optimizations and solutions. This is...

Any solution that has people creating custom magical items of 'goodberry' or whatever the fuck should only be allowed if you're willing to accept that wizards or clerics can craft infinite-use miracle rings. This goes triple if you're going to accomplish this through 3.5E chain-binding. I'll quote ...

Sorry, I lost the thought while writing. Meant that, the higher an ability is targeted on the hierarchy, the more powerful it is, and vice versa.

Those are some seriously good quotes. "Constitution: more than just a stat" sounds like the title of an entire chapter in a book.[hr]I have a weird impression that DND generally addresses higher levels of the pyramid more effectively. Wish is straight self-actualization, Leadership and Dom...

Is there a way to create a post-scarcity economy in D&D? More importantly, is there a way to create a post-scarcity economy in D&D without building it on top of powerful individuals who haven't gotten bored enough yet to say 'fuck this' and port off to fuck summoned demon prostitutes? I thi...

The goal of Atomic Rockets is to explain how much reality sucks compared to science fiction. I find it hilarious that you guys are even more pessimistic than they are. Maybe you're just working off old news and assuming that military tech advances glacially slowly. I'll accept that today's lasers mo...

If you want to compare modern in-service UAVs to mecha, please provide me with a exactly what in-service mecha you are using as the baseline. As with any of these future-tech discussions, I was using real data and my own expertise to get a ballpark estimate. Looking at my lab's robot-building budge...

A mecha has the same - or worse - problem with identifying threats from insurgents as a flying drone has. But a drone pilot can take more time to make sure that those things getting pulled out of a car are missile launchers and not ikea packages while a mecha pilot has to react faster or he gets sh...

I was planning to stay out of this thread because it was mostly fans fighting with each other about interpretation, but if you want to argue real physics I'd be happy to. It takes massive amounts of power to produce a laser, and most of the laser energy won't actually do anything to the surface it s...

Also, drones have depressingly short range and small batteries and their payload capacity is miserable. The kind of quadcopter you can buy at the store will carry 300 grams of payload for 12 minutes. I think there's a niche - put some UAV pads on top of your jeeps and when someone starts shooting yo...

I suspect that mines are going to end up pretty disappointing against mechs. Their feet aren't going to stay on the ground very long and their bellies are going to be fairly high up. Actually, my guess is that "mines" are going to be the best option that Gordon Freeman has. Old-style cont...

That walker is technically bipedal. It looks the way it does because it's walking in two dimensions rather than three - putting the extra feet on it means that it won't go side-to-side, which means the researchers can investigate the important forward-and-backward bits of walking without worrying ab...