The Gaming Den

The first declaration of “I pick the lock” is from the player and the last declaration of “the door opens” is from the Loremaster... so isn't that definitionally proactive on the part of the player? I'm guessing they think the first declaration is "there is a door" from the Loremaster? In...

See, I feel like "he chooses not to" makes way less sense from an in-universe perspective. Unless you give him some specific skills that make it easier to train fighting pokemon. In which case we've replaced "he can't use a Ponyta" with "he can't use a Ponyta well ", wh...

There are a couple of worldbuilding decisions that are important but you're sort of circling around. (Not that no one has talked about them, but I don't think people are on the same page.) The big one is, is catching pokemon tech? Like, in the video games, it's very heavily implied that it is. You c...

I think "upgrade pokemon" are supposed to be relative to what you currently have. So like if you're running a level ten Wartortle and a level eleven Kadabra or something, no one gives a shit about you catching a level 3 Pidgey but it matters if you catch a level twelve Starmie. It might he...

Frank, those numbers hold if each wild pokemon you catch has to be a full-fledged individual encounter. Other solutions: 1. Sometimes you encounter a pile of wild pokemon at once. If you have an encounter with two Geodudes, two Zubats, and an Onix, then you can get three new pokemon out of that one ...

I think Frank is at least partly misremembering. Cameron and Tasslehoff go to the future to see how Raistlin ruins everything, and then return to the present to convince him to stop. Plausibly all the changes are funneled through Tasslehoff. Raistlin gets involved in some time travel shenanigans as ...

I don't think the point is that you need to implement Movie Mewtwo. The point is that not implementing Movie Mewtwo is a choice, and once you've made that choice then your system doesn't model the movie. But in contrast, if you model the movie well, then you don't have a system that models the games...

And conversely we can think about what happens if you, say, irrigate the desert (which is basically Emerald's point). Irrigation or other land improvements should (1) make the desert more like a grassland, and (2) raise the fertility of a given hex. It doesn't make sense for irrigation to increase t...

In any case, I find the idea of kings voluntarily abdicating in favor of democracy just because they think democratic philosophy is awesome to be completely out to lunch. That has never happened and will never happen. I might be mistaken but I think it was the case in Bhutan, The Bhutan monarchy di...

The best thing about Stormlight Archive for an RPG (and a lot of Sanderson books, actually) is that it explicitly has high-level fighters. Like, Stormlight basically has ten classes that can reach high levels. And they all "have magic", in the sense that they can use Stormlight and they ge...

Superexponential means that it increases faster than any exponential function. I'm not really sure what you mean applying it to something that's decreasing. 1/x doesn't decrease faster than much of anything, since it has an asymptote at 0, and even 1-x outruns that. It doesn't dominate the asymptot...

jadagul, that's just a discontinuity at the end of the RNG. Since the goal is to impose a self-similar relationship across levels, it's not really relevant. That is, the problem isn't making CR 8 stuff twice as good as CR 6 stuff and four times as good as CR 4 stuff, it's doing that AND making CR 6...

You're both wrong. The relationship here is actually superexponential. We all agree that damage taken per round decreases linearly with an increase in AC. I think we all agree that that's not really the thing we care about---we want to track how the number of turns survived scales with AC. That wind...

It probably makes sense to include, or at least thing about, where the Eagle Clan's ancestral lands are. The Fox Clan comes from a taiga sort of region, the Carp clan comes from a coastal region, and the Eagle Clan comes from, apparently, wetland forests or something. And it's reasonable to say, on ...

Avatar is a very interesting case. TLA is a near perfect piece of storytelling that very effectively combines Korean and American sensibilities that tells a compelling story with great characters and great visuals that makes me want to hear more stories about the characters and the world. I would d...

This means that if you give +1 damage and +1 soak to both sides the amount of damage inflicted will be the same. That's actually not true. Part of the distribution gets cut off because damage taken cannot go below 0, creating a bias in the attacker's favor that increases the more dice are involved....

CaptainComics: it's a bit hard to Google because Frank's working title is Fantastic , which is also just a common adjective. But you can find a basic writeup here . The inspiration, I believe, was complaining about 4e when it came out; Frank argued that that system was better suited to superheroes t...

The game was actually made largely by Worm's author, and is basically considered secondary canon/a way for Wildbow to share worldbuilding that didn't make it into the original text. You're right that the classification system is a post-hoc creation of the PRT, but it is definitely canon that the typ...

Okay, somehow y'all are managing to focus almost exclusively on examples I have personal experience with, so I guess I'm still in this conversation. It is true that if you talk to someone who lives in Kentucky and say "I'm from Hammond", they'll have no idea what the fuck you're talking ab...

There are almost no situations where you should care about the literal city instead of the metropolitan area, unless you're worries about elections for city council. (Not a metaphorical city council. The actual political city council). This isn't a statement about TTRPGs; this is a statement about t...

Is this what you were looking for for number 1? What it really needs is special "not related to combat" abilities. Maybe a separate track so you don't have to choose between "Face Stabbing" and "Facial Expressions" or whatever. That way, when you're trying to talk your ...

Once again we get a description of spelljamming helms as essentially chairs that casters can sit in to turn magical power into motive force. We’re also informed that rangers and paladins can power helms once they gain the ability to cast spells, but this isn’t explored further. We’re then told abou...

If we want to make this advantageous for mooks but suboptimal for PC characters, one option is to say it only works for basic attacks, whatever that means in the given system. Skeletons can't do anything other than a basic attack, so the group attack is an upgrade. PCs and other "interesting&qu...

Like, I could make an complete RPG called Dragonshit, which takes place entirely in the digestive tract of a dragon, and it would be more interesting than a Game of Thrones RPG, even though both of those games end up in the exact same place, for the simple reason that Dragonshit wouldn't come with ...

If you're looking for animalistic fighting styles you might want to raid Frank's take on the Totemist.