The Gaming Den

I quite liked the system, it's got some features the Den quite likes (e.g. skill points unlock what are basically skill feats, IIRC). I like the idea of that bottom-up "skill specialization leads to class title/abilities," just because it's novel, but I can't really see how that isn't just...

Because the other option is to have them not open the door, which either means that they sit there trying again and again (which is quite boring), or just leave. If there was no urgency, no consequence to picking the lock slowly, why did you have them roll in the first place? Just narrate the Take ...

And when they try, it looks like this.

Amazon stats are extremely questionable and subject to a massive amount of both category manipulation, sponsorship, and other chicanery. Numbers of actual units sold would be meaningful, comparative Amazon rankings are extremely dubious. That's why I only cited the annual best seller list of all bo...

My understanding is that an edition's health is largely driven by core book sales. Supplements are gravy on top, but the potatoes is new core book sales. You'd expect a new edition when core book sales drop off. There's no evidence I can see that PHB sales are slowing significantly (coming in at 38,...

Foxwarrior wrote:in between "rolling dice" and "being presented with a dungeon-themed hypothetical situation and deciding what to do next" there's "roll a die to attack

No, I checked, there is nothing between "rolling dice" and "rolling dice."

I feel like the difference between the examples you've given, even though they're based on D&D/d20, is that in those games you're not being asked to do the rolling yourself. The player doesn't directly engage with the resolution mechanic itself and the computer does it for you in real time. Yes...

I'm also gonna push back on the idea that the resolution mechanic is a meaningful game system in an RPG. Look at the CRPGs that ape D&D/d20 almost entirely: early FF games, KOTOR, DDO, etc. The mechanic is deciding what to do in context, in those cases from a menu or mouse/keystroke, and how pre...

Admitting when I'm wrong: DungeonCraft's lazy Susan set-up is an abstract thing, he does not use the grid. That makes it a lot less terrible.

Well, don't just tell us you like it. Explain what it is and why it's such a good idea. It's not. The idea is you keep your map to whatever you can fit on a lazy susan and just add a few evocative terrain pieces, ignoring walls entirely . So long as you're truly just fighting a monster in the middl...

All I have to say is that there's a specific level of hell for GMs who allow their players to roll a sword dude only to troll them with post-modern Friendship Is Magic morality in the mud middle ages, thus making the only thing their character was built for useless. Eh, you can still have useful fi...

Ancient History wrote:None of the Fellowship of the Ring were asking about shares of the loot at any point.

No, but it played a pretty major role in the travails of Thorin's Company.

The combat rules are 16 pages long and ambitious. It's all narrative and die roll based, no miniatures. No hexes or squares. No move actions. No move actions? How does that work? The One Ring had an abstract positioning system where you were in one of four positions relative to the bad guys, which ...

The One Ring had an abstract positioning system where you were in one of four positions relative to the bad guys, which it somewhat misleadingly called Stances: Forward, Open, Defensive, and Rearward. The first three were all melee stances, with Rearward being ranged. Stances determined the initiati...

There are ways to incentivize continuing instead of resting, instead of just limiting resources in a way players can't control to force a new resting rhythm. The most obvious would be XP: if an XP multiplier applied for more encounters between long rests, then your average group would push through a...

The whole point of having actions with an extended activation time is to complicate the enemy's tactics. At best, it's good counterplay . Basically that means one of two things: it's an instantaneous thing that you can repeat, that the enemy just learns to avoid (probably a standard action), or the ...

I like to devide the magic pie around what it feels like to use red magic vs. blue magic, for example. Maybe I'm wrong to favor this, but my best defense for this is that magic can have whatever game mechanics, and you're going to figure that out later anyway - but using magic needs to be a rolepla...

I backed it. It has some good things and some very incomplete things, and several of the options are wildly more beneficial than others, so it's not really ready for primetime plug-n-play experience, it'll take a watchful eye and a further tinkering to make it fully work. Then again, that's true of ...

Playing a homebrewed version of it is still the best D&D experience you can get, almost two decades on. And until there's an industry-wide paradigm shift of the audience at large giving a shit about anything other than brand recognition, that's where we'll be for the forseeable future. Even tho...

Harshax wrote:I like condition tracking, personally. But, reading some replies, can someone point me to the definition of “LMSD”?

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=57291

so in MMA, boxing and so on, putting someone against the corner is usually to your advantage as they can't keep on back pedaling to avoid hits. It can also be to your advantage if you have a wall to lean on as a bugbear is trying to grapple you to the ground. In D&D and Pathfinder though there'...

those youtube actors that play dnd5e, do they do a lot of fudging of the rules or are they actually pretty knowledgable and play it as is? Talking just about CR, there is a spectrum. Some of the players do not know how their class features/spells work until the DM walks through it with them on the ...

MAG is pretty crappy. It was very under-baked, they made a new RNG and had no idea how it was really going to work. Some interesting character/group creation stuff, but the rest of it is pretty lackluster.

For the longest time my heartbreaker was primarily D&D but drawing heavily from The One Ring with fixed base weapon damage and active, rolled armor vs. critical hits; weapon skills, magic skills, and adventuring skills; basic systems for chases, social, stealth, overland travel, etc. Combat was ...

They're starting to talk 6e, or 5.5 or 5th Essentials or something. But unless there is a negative correlation between Starter Kits sold and core books sold, they have no real commercial reason to do so except that this was the idea back in 2012 when they mapped out the timeline of the next edition....