The Gaming Den

The book doesn't say that you can't parry ranged attacks, so Dodge is 100% worthless. Dodge has a better defensive charm suite than any of the other combat skill trees (except melee) and can be used while wielding a ranged weapon. Melee dudes don't really need dodge because melee is hax but say, a ...

The combat is fast enough to work, varied, and really swingy. The problems with the combat are mostly: Lack of clarity in the way certain charms are templated: Peony Blossom attack specifies that it grants an attack, but it's a melee charm, so it's unclear whether the attack needs to be a melee atta...

If there has, please tell me what it is and why it's good. If there is no good anime RPG, why do the ones currently out fail and what sort of things do you think is necessary to create a good anime game? Also, if "anime" is too broad of a concept for a single game, we can reduce the quest...

Fixed that for you. Biggest examples would be Exalted and 40K, that have lots of fans for it despite the "heroes" being giant assholes that make the world in which they live a worst place for everybody else. Heck, if anything, I can't even remember any popular tabletop RPG setting that's ...

I got a chance to skim through the 13th Age Bestiary today, and I was surprisingly impressed. Most of the monsters in the Bestiary included are old standbys, but a lot of them look like they could be fun to fight against or run. 13th Age is still full of dissociated mechanics and random Forge-ite i...

If your wizard is a lab rat you might not go on many adventures with him but it hardly matters because wizards still have insane narrative power.

Your dodging thing sounds problematic, though, because you can dodge an infinite number of attacks simply by accepting that you will never have another turn during this combat. Perhaps you should put a limit on how many future actions can be spent in this way? It's a known problem, and we're workin...

The advancement mechanics are broken but it doesn't matter because it's a oneshot game.

I like what warhammer did where they're a kind of fungus that spore and emerge fully formed out of the ground. Their mindset is also set permanently to "hooligan". This means there's no warren of baby goblins for paladins to angst over or orcs suddenly wanting to 'uplift' their race from ...

My backstories are what, 15-30 words? I like to establish a badguy the GM can maybe steal and a goal, as well as what I'm doing for work or as a profession or whatever. Anyway it's more fun to see what a character does as you play than it is to know what he did in the past. I only like backstories f...

I still have the Speed/Range table memorized. It's a scar I'm never going to heal.

d20 does have a "degree of success" not My experience with GURPS mostly comes from a mini-campaign I played where we were all STALKERs hunting for loot in Pripyat. So everyone had a firearms skill, and there were no chefs. I've had experience with other roll under systems, primarily Warha...

uhhh they're about decision making, aren't they? and defeating enemies is just a subset of that, isn't it? That's what sets RPGs apart from every other kind of game, yeah? You have a framework of rules that cover mostly any action you'd want to cover, with a fictional layer placed on top that justi...

You can say something entirely accurate about RPGs like "it's a co-operative game about defeating enemies!" and some asshole will protest and declare it is about "deep uber story and BASKETWEAVING!!!11!1!". uhhh they're about decision making, aren't they? and defeating enemies i...