The Gaming Den

Re:"Cthonian Earthshakers". I thought they were underground, so I'm not seeing the mech connection here. Are you having the Cthonian's deploy some sort of war-thing (living or machine) on the surface?

If they are secret they would have a code name like Obtuse Wallow for Nato and something similarly meaningless in Russian for the Pact. If they are known to the general public then yeah, that would work.

It obviously won't be in a human language, so are you looking for whatever it translates into?

Also, was Nato and the Pact aware of the whole anti-human alliance?

Silent Wayfarer wrote:Fair enough. I'm playing a KE HTR entry man so I was just wondering whether I should blow power points on kicking doors down rather than just firing a narrow full burst of shock lock rounds into it.

Use explosives or a battering ram. The RAW for barriers and gunfire is absurd.

[/edit]I would agree that the racism of the period, and Lovecraft in particular, is an issue that needed to be addressed more in Call of Cthulhu the RPG. Unfortunately, it hasn't been, because it's written by a bunch of assholes who think Yellow Peril and "savage races" is cool , even whe...

What are the over all population demographics of shadowrun America? I got the idea that you had a few mega cities and lots of wilderness and maybe farms The SR writers had no clue about population distribution/demographics in North America and cared less. So it makes no sense. The FASA internal mot...

Firearms are not actually "illegal" in Japan. They are extremely difficult and complex to own legally and involve the surrender of some rights. They are very rare. So for game purposes, illegal is a reasonable approximation. However, unlike some European countries where legal firearms are ...

The whole fucking world agrees SR5 has the most playable matrix ever, regardless of what you keep repeating. So you and who else composes "the whole fucking world"? Every version of the SR matrix is a pile of crap, and it has gotten more crappy with every version ever since SR4. SR4 might...

I think Data Trails (the Matrix splat book) will clarify a bunch of things, for the better. Right now the RAW is very confusing, and we can only deduce the RAI. You really think so? I think this is being written by the same crew that wrote the last 4 increasingly crappy rule versions (SR4, unwired,...

In 4th edition only an idiot would use hot sim in combat. IIRC, AR makes you essentially invulnerable while you spawn black hammer agents with your hackastack.

There a few abusive HERO character designs that use a headquarters as the trick. The Landlord is the one that springs to mind, where you have entire surface of the earth as your base.

If most people think 6 or 8 or 10 is sufficient, a martial artist could accidentally show up with like, 15+ with even trivial expenditure of points and never miss his or her opponents, which is obvious problematic. Hero is a game where you could have a viable character whose thing was that they nev...

The only point-buy game I've played where the MC has ever demanded tradeoffs like that is M&M, where it's in the actual rules for power level. Otherwise, no. There are caps across the table and possibly categorical and/or spot nerfs on powers or concepts, but M&M is the only time I've ever ...

I have no problem with steamrolling the opposition if you have a good plan well executed.

This is in itself the main problem with licensed property RPGs; you need to present at least as much material as the actual source material, or you're falling down on the job, but if you don't go beyond that, you're not actually providing anything new - you're just repackaging the same old shit. Th...

Yeah, the car stealing argument dont make sense. Any car you rob would fence for a fraction of its cost, and then you would have to deal with this market establishd players - local gangs, mafia, even police. I see a team succeeding at it once or twice, but more than that they would be in trouble. S...

Drones are cheap. I have a lot of drones. How many deckers do you have?

I think a device that converts a voice circuit to transmit data is usually called a "modem".

i hazily remember there having been a thread either here or on dumpshock where somebody actually went and posted a completely RAW step by step hacking attempt . . not sure if it was still SR4 or SR5 rules, but i think it was the latter . . and it was a long posting with many steps. The developer po...

It's like the people writing these rules never playtest them. Or even think critically about them. But that's OK, because it seems like most of the people who claim to be playing SR5, like Silva here, are not actually using the SR5 rules. They are using some weird hybrid of the rules in the SR5 book...

Maybe calling it dream magic confuses me. Are you saying you can pull the message out of the mind of the person sending it? That would certainly bypass encryption. Or is it working some other way that interact with machines etc?

Well, you can drop the whole "combat hacking" morass if you decide that dropout isn't a problem, because then the hacker combat actions are focused on shooting back, not trying to hack someone's pistol while being shot at with that pistol. Time how long it takes you to pull out your smart ...

The 3rd answer for drop out is to not care. Hackers are along to solve particular issues involving equipment and essentially their skills are add-ons to another character concept. A hackers weapons in a firefight are guns and grenades, hence they should have some skills in that direction. Frank does...

Apropos of nothing, is there a gameplay reason why damage can't come in hard codes like pre-SR4? That is, it's impossible to actually do three damage in one attack. Everything has a universally static number of health boxes and you can do 1, 2, 4, 10, or instant-kill/destroy damage. Because people ...

The way I've played CoC, outside of actual written adventures, the keeper starts the adventure going with some mystery, then decided from player input what is really going on. Which means that the one time he threw out something that totally baffled us at the start it went downhill pretty fast.