The Gaming Den

Two big reasons: 1. Not everyone is a player character and you definitely want to mechanically support the difference between the Evil Empire's Royal Guard, the local rabble and the local rabble after they've gone through a training montage led by the player characters. It's fine if the disposable p...

this games sounds fun just because I'd be 1000% in on the theme but also feels like it'd be the single greatest way to demonstrate that I can't actually handle the most basic logic in the moment rather than in chargen.

I don't completely hate Starfield (but I have shit talked it elsewhere) but I can't stress enough how much of that is based on the fact that I already had game pass for other reasons and therefore I don't have to sit there resenting the $70 fuckmothering dollars they charge for it. The best I have h...

I prefer 4e over anniversary since it doesn't introduce a minor divide by zero error for no good reason. With that said the differences are minor. Common pitfalls to be aware of and potentially houserule: 1. Character creation & advancement features an arbitrage minigame for those who wish to mi...

I'll have to add yet one more term borrowed from City of Heroes back in the day: Earth Prime. DC was operating on a multiverse concept for decades and has used the term Earth Prime for Earth-33 before, which is our earth as opposed to the Earths where most DC comics take place like Earth 1. That st...

Yeah, most of the choices in Suikoden 1 are basically just window dressing and have minimal impact on the ending; some characters may or may not be wandering around in the epilogue and that's about it. I consider that a plus, btw. I find Suikoden 2 to be a skosh overrated but I'm fond of the interpr...

I really like the music, and some character designs, and some of the areas, but man did the massive party system really screw over any chance at characterization for anybody besides Harle and Kid. Yep. Every once in a while you come across Chrono Cross apologists who insist it was better than Chron...

One of the things I hate most about the rise of apps and targeted advertising is that an article titled "Why Chrono Cross deserves an HD remake" keeps popping up in my phone feed and it won't let me post "This game is comparable to cholera" in the comments section without getting...

The funny thing about this Octopoop being a caster game is that this is the diametric opposite of the ol' FF Tactics, where Knight/Ninjas dual wielding legendary swords, Monk (attack power and evasion rates scale with level, oddly), and Thieves (Charm at will, anyone? Yoink their weapon right out o...

I think it says a lot about your professionalism that the totally free Mr Vampire thing that didn't quite work out is still one of the better (albeit short) forum gaming experiences I've had and really I blame myself for letting that peter out more than anyone else. It's a format I've never gotten t...

Will do, might take me a bit though since work is trying its damndest to cram the business we should have had last year into a 3 month window.

Why do people keep voting for assholes on the grounds that he's "our" asshole, again? It always seems like the setup to a Leopards Eating People's Faces Party meme.

Kanye dipped into weird urban survivalist shtick often enough that people also dragged out the Derelicte joke for his Adidas lookbook. It's dumb but it makes sense to me that out of touch people trying to update an dead property would end up emulating a rapper that's been washed for a decade. I thin...

Whether something is alive or not doesn't actually matter to me unless it's actively trying to make itself noticed or manages to break contact with the Veiling creature. I'm totally fine with the bogeyman using his sleep powers and the Veil to kidnap naughty children.

One of the many, many things that bothers me about anti-SJW reactionaries is how quick they are to presume expertise and insist that anything less than their own head canon is filthy revisionism. For example, it annoys me that the Mount & Blade franchise in particular has sub communities that ar...

Yeah, I feel like they leaned too hard on trying to have a story in place from day 1 and the result left me feeling penned in.

This fashion designer I've been shitting on actually nailed the Ventrue. This is the one set of fashion plates you wouldn't mistake for a Toreador. They look like Cruella DeVille types and dudes with five-figure-a-night coke habits. These authors definitely favor the high society vampires. I ended ...

kek

This seems fairly cool. As always my biggest mark against it is you know, 5e. Fundamentally it's just not a great edition for really differentiating between the bad asses and the nerds who can't hang when Grendel shows up.

Built-in opposition is a biggie, yeah. It's why I actually considered the Quantum Bears thing to be one of my smaller problems with Bear World and many other rules lite games. For all of SIlva's faffing about how themes, setting and expectations need to be clear Apocalypse World still expected you t...

Beyond that, Star Wars hasn't been presented primarily as an RPG setting for several decades. Once upon a time D&D was the only game in town and they had to do a lot of heavy lifting to establish themselves. But now the field has already been tilled and they've been the big fish in a very small ...

It's all about consensus reality. In the real world life just marches on and you can't plead your case against gravity about whether or not you should take full fall damage. RPGs depend on consensus, however, and sometimes we want it to feel self-explanatory to people that badgers can be magical eno...

I think another big reason many campaigns fail to feature anything but Tolkien skinned mayhem is that DMs sorta give up and get into this lazy mindset where player characters are seen as really the only part of the game that matters. I understand how people get there--nobody likes spotlight stealing...

I would unironically suggest you could sit at a table with the MET rules and do pretty OK. Either way you're not really playing Vampire with normies in 2021.

oWoD MET rules.

It's shit, but it's short shit, you don't need props and your character sheet is smol. Such features handily crush V5 virtually by default.