The Gaming Den

The RNG on "doing stuff" is so hopelessly broken that if you actually did write a difficulty chart it would have to make things impossible for the non-specialists or allow the specialists to cock slap the world. Even without specialization or an appropriate knack, a character who simply m...

Generally if you want a resource management game, ttrpgs are not what you're looking for. The niche is much better served by computer games OR board games, depending on the amount of time commitment you're interested in. (Resource management is generally boring for a group of people to do together i...

I kind of liked DSotBH, in a 'yep, this setting is just insane enough for this to actually work'. Being a member of a secret organization inside a secret organization inside a secret organization that's controlled by an alien virus? You know that's either an X-files plot or something WW did. Honestl...

Over the course of that campaign, I played the *only character* who survived the entire thing. [..] The fact that people died relatively frequently (averaged more than 1 death in the party per level) was part of the entertainment. Since you survived, do you feel you got less entertainment out of th...

I played in a 2nd AD+D campaign in college that ended with Night Below (and started with a survey of the best of Dungeon magazine's adventures over its entire publication history). The campaign started with 13 players (crazy, i know) and ended with around 10 or 11. Over the course of that campaign, ...

Some questions regarding how SAME works: 1) How many points is a player given to build their character, and how many points do attributes and skills cost? 2) What resource system is used to determine what powers/spells a character may use in an encounter? Are there multiple resource systems availab...

IMO, they should have just told the players 'you can't be a jedi', not make it vaguely possible and tease you with it, but fuck you over all the time. I think this is pretty lame, though. If you're playing Star Wars, it's kind of assumed that jedi are part and partial of the package. I mean, Star W...

If I recall correctly, the Lightsaber thing got even more crazy in the following editions. You had a specific skill you could level up called Lightsaber Combat, and you'd use it for parrying shit and would also add it to your 5D damage code. I'm pretty sure it didn't have the arbitrarium fuck-you n...

GM Section Chapter 6: The Force Force points are kind the kind of wankery that people thought were a good idea in the 80s. On the one hand, you can expend a force point to double your dice for a turn, that's good. On the other hand, whether or not you get the force point back or even get more depend...

"We're all fighters!" So... play 4th Edition? Yeah, this is why "fear of the bigger stuff" is the worst kind of horror. Because it's awful to actually play. Balancing at fighter tier doesn't mean everyone is a fighter. It just means your point of balance is fighter tier and not ...

If I was going to write rules for 3e horror campaigns, the first thing I'd write is 'no full casters'. Seriously. Ravenloft is a series of demi-planes that are only briefly coplanar with various prime material planes. Most of the time they have no connection to any other planes outside Ravenloft. No...

The Gamemaster Section This is about half the printed material in the book. As you might expect, this is where most of the rules actually are. Also, lots of advice about how to run a game, in varying quality. Chapter One: An Introduction to Gamemastering. In true 1980s RPG mode, the gamemaster does...

The degree to which I 'cheat' as a DM strongly depends on (1) campaign goals, (2) optimization level of characters, (3) whether cheating increases the enjoyment of the players in the game. By campaign goals i mean 'is the predominant interest (of all participants) of a gamist, simulationist, or narr...

Frank, how are you still reading this, much less wasting text writing a review of it? I think I'd have chucked the thing out a window by now in frustration.

Whipstitch wrote:

squirrelloid wrote:
That said, Shock is definitely the older card.

Nope. Bee Swarm is a Portal card and predates Shock.

... allow me to correct myself, Portal isn't even a real set! (ffs).

No wonder I didn't recognize Bee Swarm, it never had a legitimate release.

To be fair that's a 4 mana versus 1 mana--the cards are significantly different. Also the second one looks old as hell, so maybe that's why. The *second one* looks old as hell? They both look pretty new. That said, Shock is definitely the older card, I remember it (with a different picture), and it...

The question was more 'Frank, you said any power of 2 could be balanced. How? Constructive proof wanted!' Edit: Note that I'm specifically interested in what Frank was thinking when he wrote that, and which is unique to powers of 2. Everything really being a binary choice masked by stat proliferatio...

Reflavoring as an explicitly endorsed by the developer thing goes back to at least 1987 (its in SW d6 1st edition), but probably even older than that. Admittedly, AD+D 1st is very much not okay with reflavoring, but they weren't the only game in town. My knowledge of early 80s non-D+D is kind of lim...

So it isn't that you have pairs of stats, it's that you have two groups of stats no matter how many attributes you have... Ick. Wait, this is generalizeable to any even number, not just powers of 2. I'm pretty sure that's *not* what Frank was talking about. If only Frank could tell us what he was th...

It's obvious why a 4 stat system is balanced from construction, but Frank makes the stronger claim that all 2^x stat systems are balanced (or at least balanceable). Is there a constructive proof of this? More relevantly, how does a 2^3 (8) stat system not fall prey to the same balance issues as a 6...

Wow. According to the White Wolf Wiki: When asked about the meaning and pronunciation of the dot in his last name, Rein•Hagen once reportedly replied, "It's unpronounceable, and symbolizes how meaningless are the labels that we attach to ourselves." It is interesting, however, that the co...

Star Wars D6 is the reason I know the name of every alien in the Star Wars Cantina, which I'm not convinced is a good thing. As I remember the system was fun and worked well at the low end, but went into crazy town as players advanced. What does that remind me of? You say Bill Slaviscek was involve...

Player Section Important rules note: all dice are d6, so instead of writing 3d6 the game just writes 3D. Chapter I: Creating a Character This section is 4 pages long. That's it. Seriously. Character creation starts with a template (templates are found in the back of the book, you choose one), recei...

Before I get into this, there's some things we need to be clear on: (1) I am strongly in team nostalgia here. This is one of the systems I have very fond memories of playing. (2) This is from the 80s, 1987 to be exact, and so it was vastly more concerned with *simulating* a play experience that made...

It's obvious why a 4 stat system is balanced from construction, but Frank makes the stronger claim that all 2^x stat systems are balanced (or at least balanceable). Is there a constructive proof of this? More relevantly, how does a 2^3 (8) stat system not fall prey to the same balance issues as a 6 ...