The Gaming Den

I like the clocks too. One of the conceits of this game is that all rolls are done by the players, which had me struggling with how to handle villains or minor bosses. A player's roll handles both the result of their efforts and the response of their adversary. I just wrapped my head around using cl...

First off, Thieves can't find traps with a search DC of 20 or more, because Thieves don't have Trapfinding, because Thief isn't a class in 3e. Nor is it a class in 4e (although it is a sub-class) nor in 5e. The class was eliminated by cold not being printed. The point is D&D has a dedicated tra...

Is this like how there have been no Highlander sequels? Because 3e eliminated the Thief class and allowed anyone with Disable Device to disarm simple traps. If you can't find a trap without magic or setting it off first, then you haven't eliminated the Thief class at all. Simple Traps have a Search...

Prior to the Greyhawk supplement there was no weapon damage scaling, so it's plainly not an immutable sacred cow. You could distinguish weapons in other ways. That's a bad argument. There's been no iteration of the game since the Greyhawk supplement that weapon damage didn't use funny shaped dice. ...

I phrased that poorly. It was clear I was having a tough day. The games I'm most familiar will almost invariably come out and say that the skill list won't cover every conceivable action a character can make and/or that it isn't suitable for activities that 'should' default to natural talent (Attrib...

All the WOD games have skill symmetry as well as After Sundown. One thing... This is factually wrong. World of Darkness is infamous for skill creep in it's expansions. I don't remember if NWOD had skill creep or not, because I couldn't be bothered to plop 50 bucks down for any expansion books, but ...

Why are you talking about Fate? Blades is an Apocalypse World offshoot. I dunno. I thought it was more Fate based because it is published by Evil Hat? It reminded me more of Torchbearer as far as play structure. It also uses dice pools, instead of 2d6. Classes referred to as Playbooks should have b...

The last Blades in the Dark thread got crapped on, so I'd like to bring it up again to see if anyone else has picked it up found anything useful in the rules, never mind the setting. Now, this might be nothing new to Fate users. I'm not educated about Fate specifically. I just got a copy of BitD and...

I think characters should automatically have Knowledge at Level + 3 in Local, History, Geography about their home region or town. Druids, Rangers, Priests and Wizards should automatically have Nature, Religion and Arcana as appropriate. Murderhobos don't waste skill points on knowledge skills. Tryin...

I couldn't follow all the references. I assumed they were EU, but I don't follow it much.

I think TheFlatline has the gist of how to describe what happened to the Executor. The A-wing must have been piloted by a PC that burned all his elan to go out in a blaze of glory.

I mean, there is absolutely nothing at all that requires a new stealth zone? I'm not sure that's accurate. Games are broken down into manageable sequences of melee, encounters or scenes. The MC has to establish what's at stake, the potential reward and the players have to choose if and how to engag...

I guess I don't remember the rules correctly, but the rest of the example illustrates the need for different stealth zones to be treated as new areas or contests. Unless the stealther has scried or otherwise gathered intelligence about the next area, his attempts to stealth should be a new one. I gu...

The premise is that you roll once, and then pay your currency per detector, so unless you are super super super keen on rerolling because you rolled a 1, there is no reason to want to create a new stealth section. If all the detectors from before aren't around, then your currency is "at maximu...

I quite liked the the mini-map geomorphs. I recall that the city map inserts were provided to emulate the constant growth and decay that a chaotic metropolis like Lankhmar would undergo. I think the intention was for the MC to change them periodically. It was also a way, if you think about it, to ju...

Well, keep in mind those are Deities & Demigods stats, and don't follow the regular rules for multiclassing or dual-classing. That both makes it more confusing, b/c I never read the Deities & Demigods advancement mechanics; as well as making it more interesting, b/c this seems like some sor...

Well, keep in mind those are Deities & Demigods stats, and don't follow the regular rules for multiclassing or dual-classing. It's weird that the makers of D&D knew that the class/level system couldn't accurately depict every hero, and Fafhrd and Grey Mouser are just heroes not demigods, bu...

Is DCC the Spinal Tap edition of the original Hackmaster? I kind of get that impression but am only cursorily familiar with both games and have never played them.

I would love to see a drunken review of this game! I remember really liking all the ways a character might have a random magic quirks, but I don't think I ever successfully made a single character.

I think I picked up this game around the same time as Rolemaster. Both never got much playtime.

Savage Worlds has card based positions and distance for three dimensional combat. I added facing based on suit: aces front, spades rear, hearts and clubs left and right flank. This was added to introduce the importance of turrets vs the firing arcs of fixed mounted weapons. Never got to use the RAW ...

But a major weakness of this game, it really doesn't support creating your own new, heroic archetypes and having them hang out with Elric or in Elric's world. While I think there is a fair bit of criticism to level at Stormbringer, I find this one to be the weakest. I've never heard any player voic...

I stopped geeking hard on languages and scripts like those discovered in Tolkien's works after I was well into puberty, but I do appreciate their inclusion in campaign material. I cite Tolkien, because I was exposed to his works so early in life that it's the literary equivalent of comfort food. Lat...

After reading the oMage v nMage thread, I'm chomping on the bit to give these rules a try. The concept is evocative, so I'm going to riff on the fluff for a moment: Reading this over, it occurs to me that it's a real shame Sleepers aren't called Convicts instead, because non-Doubters could be seen a...

Neither Touch nor Taste has ever been featured in any Stealth encounter I've ever encounters and yeah, I was being purposely absurd. So I started looking at other physical bluffs as stealth attempts and was just having fun with it: Stealth: The Stealthening Picking a pocket from behind is stealth vs...

In order to have fire: oxygen, heat and fuel are required. I think that stealth rules should be similar in that you have 3-4 criteria that must be met. Class features promoting stealth work by removing these requirements. I'm trying to wrap my brain around what these criteria could be, as you said ...