The Gaming Den

It seems like both games had such an easy way to clean this up in-setting: make the act of hooking things up to your nervous system steal your soul. That conveniently excludes all current implants, and writing fluff where your skin armor is nervous-system-connected to allow you a sense of touch see...

And now I want RPG stats for primitive rockets and fire lances and all that prototype shit that China came up with first. I think that would be pretty cool. If your hypothetical Oriental Adventures game had alchemists who made rockets and firelances and such, that would be a thematic character. It'...

GnomeWorks wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:The Anti-Paladin is introduced in Dragon Magazine #39, in July 1980.

After perusing that, I have to say: that was a bizarre read.

"Should we stop being so amazingly sexist all the time? Experts disagree."

-Username17

Anti-paladins were in one of the first issues of Dragon magazine. They weren't invented by Stross.[/i] The Anti-Paladin is introduced in Dragon Magazine #39, in July 1980. As far as I know there is no previous official or semi-official Anti-Paladin writeup. The Fiend Folio was actually published in...

Scrolls of summoning arguably fit better into a Japanese Fantasy setting than medieval Europe. There's real significant East Asian support for calligraphy based magic. Much more so than in European traditions. But I don't think it's a deal breaker either way. In any particular fantasy setting the m...

The fact that Cyberpunk 20XX was willing to "go there" as far as the Mr. Stud implant was a level of adulting that Shadowrun never would not match at the time. For the Cyberpunk > Shadowrun people, that was pretty much the point of contention. AncientHistory and I got some pretty out-there...

The thing of Bolsonaro testing positive has been disputed. I mean, I don't expect anything that comes out of his office to be true , so I don't really know whether he has it or not. BoJo kind of obviously had it on Wednesday when he stopped showing up for press conferences and named a successor, but...

We can also have guns used by female samurai governors like in Princess Mononoke. But I would argue that those kinds of guns aren't strictly necessary . It is in fact OK if you don't have "gunner" as a badass protagonist archetype for player characters to be. Now, I definitely wouldn't say...

A recent video from Nanjing's current situation made by a japanese and uploaded to youtube. Notice the complete lack of piles of millions of bodies anywhere. Allow me to introduce you to the concept of a PotemkinVillage . There is absolutely no doubt that there are places in China where the plague ...

So is China lying about their numbers now Almost certainly. China was lying about their numbers before they faced collapse in Wuhan so hard that the first country to report human to human spread of SARSCOV2 was Taiwan . They literally went full men-in-black denial for like 2 months until they were ...

Looks like I have to take away praise from the house since they didnt pass the good bill and now the senate is going to pass a mostly bad bill except for sanders unemployment expansion and then are going to leave town for a month to force dems to pass it through the house or not have any response. ...

The virus is almost certainly not directly affecting your neurochemistry or mood or anything like that. ??? Can we actually know that? In the broader sense anything that affects your metabolism in any way has an effect on your brain. Because your brain is not a glowing soul fragment but a physical ...

The Yakfolk, and especially their "magic jar" ability, really underlines some of the simple weirdness in how 2nd edition AD&D wrote stuff. So first of all, we all get that the Yakfolk possession is not a god damn thing like magic jar , right? It has none of the tactical utility, the ta...

@Frank, What numbers do you trust? Apparently you don't trust the numbers of Germany and not the ones from the US. On what basis, do you form your opinions? I mean, yes the numbers from the above Johns Hopkins University will have mistakes in them, but we should be able to get some basics of inform...

I tend to believe the numbers about deaths. I absolutely don't believe the numbers about deaths. 153 thousand people die every day in this world, and the number of them that are tested for SARS-COV-2 is extremely small. There are old people dying at home in every country of the world that aren't te...

The very most important fact about brain waves is that they do not do anything. Brainwaves are an incidental byproduct of your brain doing stuff. Your brain does not use the gamma wave to learn, the act of learn generates a stronger gamma wave. The brainwaves are waste energy, and the frequencies of...

The international numbers seem to be about 20%/5%/1%. That is: 20% of infections need hospitalization, 5% need intensive care, 1% die. Countries reporting markedly different numbers than that are generally attributable to fuckery in data accumulation rather than having an especially good or bad medi...

MERS (why did they put a place name in that one?!) is also known as the camel flu because it can be transmitted from camel to human. But it's not an easy transference. The WHO decision that viruses should not be named after locations was made in 2015. MERS was first reported in 2012, so it got name...

It's more than a little bit unnerving how many of the world's major countries are just fucking lying to everyone at the highest levels of government. So obviously Trump went on a tweet rampage extolling the virtue of Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin despite those things not actually having had ad...

This either presages or copies from Shadowtalk, an editorial convention where named Shadowrunners had sidebars throughout your Shadowrun rulebooks. Shadowtalk became a thing in the Street Samurai Catalog , which was the first expansion book for Shadowrun back in 1989. Now Cyberpunk 2013 has some pu...

Small dicepools are pretty low variance. The difference in chance of success between one difficulty and the next is big . If you seriously expect people to be rolling 4 die pools at TN 4+, just keep in mind that adding or subtracting one from the difficulty changes your absolute chance of success by...

The notion being that you can trade in dice so 4 dice can automatically succeed at DC needing 2 hits. 6 dice automatically can succeed at DC needing 3 hits. that sounds kind of terrible. At TN 4+, you get 4+ hits on 6 dice just 34.4% of the time - about one in three. If you can 'take ten' on a 3 hi...

Seems this setting is more about going from city to city than beating up savages in the wilderness? Certainly an issue from the standpoint of actually playing Al-Qadim is that it is not really obvious what you're supposed to be doing. Like, maybe you're supposed to take over a city and become Sulta...

I cannot speak to the supplements, but IMO I don't really get the vibe that the writers in the boxed set are getting overly weighed down by 'historical accuracy.' I do not speak Arabic so I don't know how cringy-sounding the transliterated names and titles are, but strictly speaking from a setting ...

Why not set the standard DC based on the median (or whatever cdf percentage works) instead of the average? That makes the shape of the tail independent of the standard success chance, and allows the game effect of the distribution's tail shape to be considered separately. The mean value is generall...