The Gaming Den

What everyone else said is pretty much true. Find a reason to be with people rather than just... coasting. A note on "pickup/game theory" though which was pointed out elsewhere in this thread. If you want a girlfriend (or boyfriend!) and not a one night stand, don't use it. It is exactly w...

Yes, that Troy. The one in the Iliad. The story of the siege contains in its a pretty standard adventure in-play. You dither around forming the party, making preparations to go to the adventure location, when you start there you go on and have a few random encounters and sidequests, and then eventua...

Is there some way I can avoid having any numbers at all on a character sheet? I wanted to do a no-skills all-powers system, but I'm not sure how granular to get. Do I end up needing to explicitly write in a power for every type of gadget that can be built/hacked/operated? How do I draw the line bet...

Out of the box this screws over PCs. Monsters are designed by lazy developers, so they'll just give the Dragon +30 natural armour and move on to the next monster. When players are stacking all those modifiers they're not putting the monster's attacks off the RNG, they'll putting it on to the RNG. I...

A general rule I have learned from playing way too much fucking D&D 3e, and then turning around and playing Weapons of the Gods. Hard cap the number of modifiers. Find a way that works. "Use highest" is a good one. Highest bonus, highest penalty. Or just highest value period. If you wa...

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks] In as much as I got half a dozen or so reported posts about thread spamming, it is obvious there needs to be some sort of anti-thread spamming rule. To that end, how do we want to phrase it? [*]Something about limiting posts per page by a given user? [*]Something ab...

Just throwing ideas at a dartboard, feel free to disregard. You should try to have the number of chakras end on five (a nice direct link to the elements involved) or seven (the elements + one for yourself [inner universe] and one for the world [outer universe] I suppose?), if only because those are ...

It's never clear what you should design a game for, actually, because at various points he suggests different things based on assessing a game, because games are never purely-whatever or something. Which basically means it fails to be a theory as it predicts nothing and recommends nothing.

Okay, how exactly does the angel determine if it's being seen? It can't be measurement (sight is passive), so it has to have something to do with the observer. Does that mean that it works based on the camera (the eye), or does it work based on what's going on in the observer's modeling software (t...

No one can tell what the fuck GNS says. No, scratch that. Many people can tell. Just no two of them tell it quite the same way. I keenly remeber titanic flamerwars entirely devoted to figuring out what GNS says, where its proponents still failed to produce any clear answers. GNS terminology is supr...

Ummm, who is Ron Edwards and why should we care? That was my reaction. According to the RPGnet thread, his gentle guiding hand is responsible for all indie games ever printed. Wisdom shines forth from every word he types. The cave-dwelling troglodytes who had been crudely hammering out primitive RP...

So when designing a system, consider how it would create a variety of effects (or decide that those effects are not necessary in your system). For instance - one spell from each school, 3rd level: * Dispel Magic * Summon Monster III * Clairvoyance * Suggestion * Fireball * Major Image * Halt Undead...

As several people pointed out, there's really no interface system for it that is extant in D&D. A reasonable possibility might be on the low end having people gain virtual size categories in a similar manner to Powerful Build (so you can pick up someone's house and beat them with it) and at the ...

there was still a problem before PL showed up. Granted, a rational person (what's that?) would likely have just left the game and let the weirdos have their badwrong fun. but nerds are nothing if not unreasonable... The point is that the internal group dynamic will lead to blame being placed on Pho...

Portable hole. Fold it up to be as big as a handkerchief and you can wear it as a dress.

I think that might be the best idea. I don't want to just have it be a bunch of premade spells since that defeats the whole idea. But having specific, defined, scalable effects that you can link together with certain words could definitely work. As Frank said, you don't want three different words t...

I think for this case we could one-up Ars Magica by having words or pieces have a very specific meaning in this syntax, or rather a specific game mechanical effect.

Because gamers want to be able to use human level analysis powers on the math in the game, and not have to necessarily bust out a calculator to get an eyeballed estimation of what is going on. If you reduce the number of variables going in, you can figure stuff out more readily. Now, I'm not saying ...

See now I thought you were saying that you wanted the tiers to be "Mundane" "Magic" "Immortal/Godly" Essentially saying that you interact only with the normal world at first tier, then with magic at second, and then with broadly expansive powers and abilities with rela...

Magic The Gathering has all of the elements for a great RPG game. And tying D&D to it would probably result in a flood of new players to replace the grognards that are/will dying off. I suppose it's possible. But I wonder how many Magic players really care about the game world "fluff"...

(Something probably rather tongue in cheek) Hm. Well I didn't think I would need to point out the barbies thing is just a metaphor for having things revolve around having cool accessories and storing them in your cool accessory mansion. I mean clearly when I say that you are a Barbie and you gain p...

So like how characters in 3.5 D&D "unlock" the ability to do shit they care about with their Swift Action slots, only more codified and transformational? A thing to worry about is that higher level characters will almost by definition have more options available to them, so if you als...

So this is just a very rough idea I am throwing out here, and I think I may have mentioned it before or perhaps Frank talked about it briefly but I don't recall as much discussion. It also is tangentially related to the other "Three Tiers" post but not quite directly. 4e was very worried a...

Also, with D&D, you generally kill the dragon/orcs/big bad evil guy. In SR, you can't kill the megacorp, and you probably will get screwed over down the line in retribution. Also, in the atypical SR, you don't keep the loot, you get paid to lift it. D&D takes an "optimists" view t...

I see no problem with that, provided characters can get ahold of those spells. Other than that unless there is a ubiquitous defense against them, then people would be idiots to ever answer their phone? Why not let webpages upload the same spells while you're at it? Per the spells, the writing (in t...