The Gaming Den

there's a few houserules out there and i've seen at least one overhaul that puts all classes on short rests + replaces spell slots with a spell point variant. i'm gonna just list off houserule ideas i know 1. Getting knocked down imposes a level of unconsciousness. Prevents yoyo-ing but completely f...

i think his argument is "they're terrible at design in general so by going rules-lite there's less shit rules"

i wouldn't take that as a super serious argument

its a good question too since it lets us figure out hit thresholds in After Sundown's system and what they mean. a visual display of "threshold" vs "chance of succeeding" for various dicepool sizes: https://i.imgur.com/mLSZ4UJ.png (ideally there would be more tickmarks on the % s...

How hard would it be to take the After Sundown engine and use that to run WoD material? Barring that, are there any notable mechanical changes from aWoD to AS? AS is very unpolished and rough around the edges atm, probably worth it to look up what other people here who ran it did. The only houserul...

Won't even necessarily do that. Repeated rolling to model an extended action might "work" from a math perspective. Especially if you're doing something like crafting or lockpicking where the ultimate outcome is largely expected to be deterministic but you're wanting to generate an amount ...

It's not reversing the burden. It's pointing out that even trained math experts find tying the math to a compelling narrative experience to be an incredibly hard thing to achieve in the first place. In short, I'm not saying that it's bad for RPG designers to know math. I'm saying they will still ha...

First of all, the idea that people don't want better math is absurd. 4e D&D sold itself with the idea that "The Math Just Works" and it got the highest pre-orders of any D&D book of any edition period. People obviously wanted what they were selling. The crashing and burning of 4e ...

By that logic, how would you demonstrate anything? Anything could be faked, if you can't reproduce it yourself. You need to believe some people, you can't redo everything yourself. The key word there was "scientifically". It's pretty easy to demonstrate things. This sort of discussion isn...

But how do you scientifically demonstrate and reproduce those crazy things? Video recording? Photographic evidence? Pfft, like those are reliable. I'm imagining a werewolf going around the scientific community showing off his War Form as reproduction of a test. But that's not really even science at ...

Not really. There's a great deal of bad design among RPG designers but many of the most successful Euro games are designed by people with actual math degrees. I think you're reversing the burden. I'm arguing that RPG designers suck at math because most people do and, in response, you're citing Euro...

To answer my own question: designers don't think sensibly about numbers because most people do not think sensibly about numbers. And there isn't much pressure from the gaming community to deal with that because most people do not think sensibly about numbers and instead interact with a system based ...

It's also wroth remembering that creating a system that holds up in all cases is pretty much impossible, or absurdly complex. I mean, you could possibly make a physics system that perfectly models real word physics, in which PC stats include things like lung volume, muscle mass, and red blood cell ...

Oh, or: the population is less violent and the numbers match up because of the extra supernatural violence.

I don't want my players to target marginalized minority communities. I get that it's effective but it isn't a great look to have the PCs say, "Gotta feed, time to go find a poor black person and get 'em." After Sundown explicitly has more murders as part of the setting so, to me, it would ...

I have to say, I'm very amused by the fact that the third post had "willful denial" as a comedy option and then Frank argued that, in fact, willful denial is the coin of the realm here. And he's right. Video and photographic evidence is all suspect nowdays since we can fake basically anyth...

You can probably implement it in such a way that posts with Markdown are converted into BBCode (e.g. * into <i>, ** into <b>) before they're put on the server's post DB so it's backwards compatible. IDK how annoying it is to mess with phpbb though.

targeting this at urban horror/fantasy set in the present day. examples include VtM, Unknown Armies, After Sundown, Dresden Files (i don't know enough abt Dresden Files so bear w me here) so: how do you maintain a hidden conspiracy of supernatural beings in a time when there are more cameras than pe...

You aren't going to grapple or shove things anyway, because it's a waste of fucking time. (unless the shove is a rider effect on a real action). The only thing grapple does is set the target's speed to zero for the duration of the grapple. It can still fucking murder you or cast spells with no pena...

Oh, and the most important thing: you let them use Dex as their casting stat. That's what you really want. You want to do magic by being good at arrows and having magic arrows. I'd disagree with that if regular full casters had to deal with MAD. like INT for spell slots, CHA for power, WIS for etc....

Arcane Archer actually does have some niche: you wanna have magic arrows you shoot at things. You're Hawkeye, motherfuckers! Instead of the way they did it though you wanna just add some more spells that key off ranged weapon attacks (similar to the melee weapon attack spells from SCAG). If you real...

You seem to be extremely upset that 5e has done so well, though I can't, for the life of me, get why. Given how well the PHB is doing, and the release of thei SaaS digital tool + actually adding staff for a change, seems to be going pretty Plus, given how widespread the game is at most FLGS, just a...

yeah the flip flop thing and matched successes/failures is a massive pain when trying to decouple the system from the d100 maybe i should just run that shit with FATE or whatever e: afaik d100 roll-under basically just assumes a single difficulty threshold for all tasks. my bold idea to fix it is l...

yeah the flip flop thing and matched successes/failures is a massive pain when trying to decouple the system from the d100 maybe i should just run that shit with FATE or whatever e: afaik d100 roll-under basically just assumes a single difficulty threshold for all tasks. my bold idea to fix it is le...

I might do a thing abt it, i love the fluff of UA and reading the books is what got me interested in TTRPGs. I can see where you're coming from but it really doesn't do enough to pitch what your stock campaign is. (Conversely, I clearly didn't read the fluff properly in places - I saw all the talk ...

Unknown Armies: Third Edition has been released Some notable changes: No base attributes. No different kinds of checks. It's all "roll under Skill or Identity". I cannot find the guidelines for when players need to roll . Fuck Madness Meters are now "Shock Gauges". They are the ...