The Gaming Den

I'd bet that most hard-core racists in the US today are more progressive than the most progressive people of 1863 US. Hard core racists in the US today are calling for mass murder, or personally committing murder, or at least angrily defending and supporting murderers. The most progressive people o...

Much depends on how weird you want your weird west. If magic is a big enough deal, the West will be largely unrecognizable and you might as well go high fantasy or set it in space or some fucking thing. On the other hand, the actual Wild West had unreconstructed slavers and genocide against Native ...

Shadowrun had a state where your social status is based on a nation-wide academic and athletic test and whether you're a Tolkienesque ubermensch or not.... Shadowrun certainly has more than its share of shitty and lazy writing. But I won't let you say you cannot make it resonate with our time. Part...

I can buy that a clan is something that you personally identify with, and your aunts, uncles, cousins, etc are all members of your clan. But if you're from Heilongjiang and you find yourself in Yunnan, I would expect regional differences to trump clan affiliation. If it doesn't , I think you need t...

It's not that restricting player choice is good or bad, but that encouraging a kind of build by setting up mathematical traps for other builds and hoping for people to figure that out is bad. I really doubt they usually know it's a trap. The mathematical cluelessness of the average RPG writer is pr...

Stahlseele wrote: You now start to see where the damage system kinda breaks at not even that high end right?

There is also the minor detail that grandma with a .22 is basically incapable of seriously hurting anyone.

Fun fact, old religious iconography had a very strict set of aesthetic requirements tenuously rooted in archaic bible fanfiction which is why it all looks incredibly bizarre, but in the same way every time. Like the saints are all drawn with thin noses because in the divine grace of heaven the brea...

Today, police response times are 8-15 minutes in most cities and 30-60+ minutes in the country. They should be even longer in the 1920s with inferior communications, transport, procedures, etc. In some neighborhoods, under the right context, people may not call the cops even if they could. My grand...

The manager of a division of a pharmacy company in a mega-corp would, at most report to the president or CEO of the pharmacy company. And probably would report to someone below the president. The president reports to a VP, who maybe reports to the CEO. I think understand what you're saying but you ...

I had a lot of fun way back when with Bushido, which kind-of combines the worst aspects of D&D and RuneQuest. Until the GM ran off with one of the other players, abandoning her husband - who was also playing. That got kind of ugly. It's largely the group you play with that makes a game fun or no...

Just use the actual SR hacking rules exactly as written and have intelligent adversaries. After one Hall of Mirrors run they will be willing to talk.

Tankers call infantry 'crunchies' for some reason... It's probably less bad to get run over by a tank off-road than get run over by the wheel of a 30 ton HEMTT on that same spot, but it's likely to be a bad day either way.

APCs, at least, are thought to offer limited protection against bombs - there's a story (which I can't at the moment find) about soldiers in Vietnam riding outside their vehicles for protection. I understand that even "up-armored" humvees were not thought to provide good proection in Iraq...

To run out of liquid fuel you'd have to have run out of all the water and carbon. That seems kind of unlikely, and with those you can build liquid fuels. The nazis built synthetic fuel plants in WW2 that worked. And if it comes to that you can run a turbine or IC engine on hydrogen cracked out of wa...

Do not assume the reluctance of the West to accept military casualties over the last 30 years is true of all nations and will hold true for all combatants in a future war. Something upwards of 13% of the population of the USSR (21% of the male population) died during WW2. Not all from the Germans, S...

See, here's what I don't understand. Every supers game I've ever played has claimed to model exactly that. None of them encourage you to run that PARTY, but they publish stats for Hawkeye and they publish stats for the Hulk and when you play the game with either character the game is exactly as pla...

Hero scales reasonably well from 150-200 point characters to 450 point characters. The issue that you get at the high end is that people whose characters went from 250pt characters to 400pt characters are usually built very different than people who built a 400 pt character or even a 350 pt characte...

You can make the World's Finest comic book, where you have Batman and Superman side by side (or Huntress and Powergirl, if that's your thing). But firstly it requires you to use a pretty low power version of Superman who is closer to Max Fleischer cartoons than to the levels where he's going back i...

Serious question. Why would you think it was a design goal to model Phoenix and Jubilee in the same system? Even if you accept that they are in the same world, why should the game model them both as player characters? Same reason DnD does it. So you can have power fantasies and escalation of power....

I bought 6th edition but never got too far into it. The main thing seems to be that figured characteristics are gone - you have to buy them directly - and elemental control are gone. So bricks are more expensive as you don't get all that lovely end, pd and stun for free. But the hulk is a massively ...

With the pricing of Variable Power Pool, "is a wizard who can do anything" is a side ability you can toss onto lots of characters. So unless this Brick needs to put all their points into flying and punching, they can afford to also solve all noncombat problems too. The control costs of a ...

The manager of a division of a pharmacy company in a mega-corp would, at most report to the president or CEO of the pharmacy company. And probably would report to someone below the president. The president reports to a VP, who maybe reports to the CEO. It's like D&D at Hasbro. Hasbro is a 5 bill...

Essentially, SR megacorps are pre-war Japaneses Zaibatsu on a global scale.

Second that...many year before the Tueller Drill, but the concept is the same. The problem is that if you are at a table there is this table between the guy pulling the gun and the guy pulling the knife. Who has to stand up and jump across the table and who can just shoot from his seat? Action is f...

When you got from vampires to magicians wouldn't the rules change? Predators need a reasonable predator/prey relationship. So you can't get crazy. And there appear to be obvious survival benefits to being the first or second toughest vampire in Gallop NM as opposed to being the 9763rd toughest in NY...