The Gaming Den

I think it would make more sense for the legend of the magic item to grow as the PC wielded it. Of course the stories would become progressively more epic as the campaign levels kept climbing. In a very real sense, reputation would be power in this context, or alternatively, epic deeds literally cr...

Railroading, like sex or Leon Trotsky's pickaxe, is all in the mind. My group is fairly allergic to it, but I've played with some who are either amateur dramatics types or hardcore die-rolling combat munchkins and who prefer to be led by the nose from set piece to set piece. Personally I find that m...

[pitch-perfect talking sword speech that I'm probably going to steal and use] Even James "Grim" Desborough realised that talking swords are a poor idea, destined to do little more than irritate everyone. Trying to play one straight and make players think it's cool is simply a doomed ventu...

You were clearly talking about D&D. Anyway, +1 swords are boring because they create their own boringness. If it is meaningful to refer to a magic sword as a +1 sword, it also implies there are +0 and +2 swords, which ends up creating the expectation that you will have a +1 or +2 sword at certa...

Then the player would know exacly what to look for in the game, since its all very basic and intuitive. Plus, the effects are pretty much deducteable too (fire damage, bonus against giants and Ice, light emitting, etc). What do you think ? I think players would bitch about being railroaded (and the...

Hmmm, I dont remember if all that info is disclosed to the player. I suspect its only for the GM. That would be an interesting proposition, if the full info on the item was relvealed as soon as the player acquired. But as I said above, dont know if thats the case. I have never, in all my decade plu...

That would be why. I'm not a D&D player.

It takes the same amount of time in game whether you roll or take 10.

I'd never heard of the guy before. This line alone convinced me that he's never actually played an RPG.

Interesting, so the player would sort of know the entire future of their campaign magic items as soon as they got it. Did that sort of magic item progression mean that people would tweak their character builds specifically to match the item's future forms?

Well, obviously if you think that adding random bullshit bonuses to +1 swords for free is possible, then it doesn't make sense for plain +1 swords to exist. That is not really supported by anything. For instance, the sword of +Riding you mentioned by the rules is a sum of a +1 sword and a +Riding i...

Earthdawn magical items rules are one of the most innovative and interesting Ive seen - at first, a magical item work exactly like a mundane counterpart, but as the player uncovers information about the item's history, and spends legend points to activate it, he unlocks some of the magic in the ite...

Yeah, it sounds like he's saying that if you're going to take up magic item space, it better be more interesting than simply "+2 bullshit bonus". I may have been spoiled by Ars Magica, but I can't look at magic items without thinking: "Who made this, and for whom? Why did they only h...

Oh yeah, and adventurers. Actual adventurers were a thing. Just not a good thing. Knights were increasingly, as the medieval era went on, an anachronism seen by everyone as such. They ended up being somewhat like today's super-rich: a dead weight on society who were obsessed with using whatever lega...

Serfdom sucks. Like, more suckage than is possible to comprehend. For example, in late medieval Poland every male peasant owed his feudal lord eight days' work every week. As a result, if you didn't have a family to grow food for you and do that extra day on your behalf, you are totally boned. You'l...

Remember that Johnson is GW's "cling to obsolete ideas that are too niche to be profitable in a mass-market way" guy. That's his job within the company. He does it very well. He isn't the guy who's going to come out and say "yeah, it wasn't popular so we stopped." Being British m...

I was typing my post at the time that one was posted, sadly. It's a case of simultaneity. I'd also point out that while I personally like Jervis Johnson, I'm not a hundred percent sold on his "no really guys! We did make money off them! It's just that nobody played them!" line. Yes, people...

I'd be interested to see that too. I have a massive amount of respect for Ars Magica's system (it actually... wait for it... works) and would be interested to see what people here make of it.

Squats existed on paper in 2nd edition 40k (aka "the one that made them famous", aka "the one that everyone of my generation remembers") but never actually had any models made, and correspondingly never made any money. Therefore, when the transition came to 3rd edition (aka "...

Void spells in L5R. They do one of the following: a) If the player actually has a job and a life that are interesting and fulfilling, and as a result puts a relatively small amount of energy into working out the intricacies of their gaming system, the spells are simply bad. Not only are they less po...

These are all from my Ars Magica game, but fairly easily ported over. Farrel the Many: Three identical middle-aged human males who always walk around together, occasionally bumping clumsily into one another. Whether Farrel always had three bodies or whether he's taken over the other two via telepath...

Riffing off what Frank posted, it may be easier to avoid Dan Brown Disease altogether and actually use the alchemical symbols and alchemical names. If pseudo-historical pseudo-Latin and pseudo-mysticism is cool (and we know it is because of the number of games and other media that use it), then actu...

The symbols for each sphere are things that they do own. The symbols are standard alchemical ones. There's clear prior art showing them being used in a magical context since the age of John Dee and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, making it undeniably public domain. From Wikipedia: Correspondence is a s...

Blade, Ikeren, thanks very much. I've come up with some ideas based on what you've said. Blade I love your idea of dividing the world up into classes / cultures / etc and allowing people different social abilities to do with each. That works really well with Steampunk, especially if you get into the...

(First post! Woot!) So. A group of young ladies, including my sister, my ex, another girl I dated briefly and a flatmate of one of the above have approached me with the plaintive cries of players to the GM whom they know full well cannot resist. "Run something steampunk," they say, "w...