The Gaming Den

You seemed to be busily self refuting your own statements as hard and fast as you could. Nothing I've said refutes myself. I only have two points: 1) The historical record is incredibly sparse, and it's not difficult to make a secret history that fits it with plausible deniability. 2) Earthdawn did...

Orca wrote:I'm just getting started. Earthdawn as written couldn't fit into a secret history at all because it really wasn't intended to.

I literally just said that, do you think you're arguing against me? Do you think I said something different?

Even then, the existence of the Vandals was recorded by other cultures that did leave an archeological record. For an entire era to have no cultures that left any such record in an area doesn't just require that not one culture have writing but that not one culture have effective construction techn...

Suspending our belief to have a secret past society leave no archeological record requires completely rethinking how humans act. Except there are plenty of past societies that left no archeological record. The archeological record is incredibly sparse . Humans have, conservatively, been around for ...

What follows is a few pages of perfectly serviceable direction for what a game session might be like and what the 'gamejudge' and players need to do to prepare, and then we're thrown headfirst into some hand signal nonsense. See, the idea is that you're probably going to buy this book in an ordinar...

Okay, there are two things that really need to be cleared up because they just keep being repeated. 1) linear character generation is not automatically faster than geometric generation. In the very specific case of having to do all of the math in your head it is easier , but once you have more than ...

It's not that restricting player choice is good or bad, but that encouraging a kind of build by setting up mathematical traps for other builds and hoping for people to figure that out is bad.

*shrug* WoD mechanics aren't exactly shining examples of quality, but in general there are at least enough combat options that you don't automatically know someone with STR 5 DEX 2 is going to lose against someone with STR 2 DEX 5. That's the whole purpose of the charm webs, magic swords and shit. Y...

So you want a game where your choices of stats and Charms doesn't mean that you can't win? Honestly, I may have misinterpreted this, the double negative made it confusing. Longes said the social combat minigame is deterministic, meaning if I have a 9 and you have a 10 then my loss is inevitable, ev...

That is an ugly straw man argument and you know it.

I guess that's the contradiction that I don't get. Being forced to retreat from a mini-game that I'm bad at doesn't count as "skullfucking" in my opinion, especially when there is another mini-game like combat where being bad at it means the GM can take your character sheet and rip it up....

If we get knocked down the tech tree, we will probably be able to use leftover technology to get back up the tree quickly, but you cannot give an iPad to a watermill factory and expect them to be able to immediately produce circuit boards with a squillion transistors just because they've got workin...

The fact is that if nano-assemblers exist then the only technology that matters is getting access to an unlocked nano-assembler. It's like the joke of pirating 3D printers by printing more 3D printers, only real. Even if a nano-assembler can't make more nanobots, an unlocked assembler can make all t...

That really is truly awful, it's always terrible to lose someone close, but especially terrible when it's sudden and unexpected.

Well, yeah, unless you have a first-gen Pentium, of course.

Trying to faithfully transfer a video game crafting system to TTRPG never works because the opportunity costs of each system are wildly different. Video games have neigh-unlimited single player downtime and literal spreadsheets to track how many owlbears you've hunted down and harvested, and how man...

Same difference. You're still doing additive character building at generation and then exponential later on; the only difference is that instead of having fixed points to spend on select categories (i.e. White Wolf-style) you add another layer of decision making (Shadowrun-style). The general purpo...

Really what you're arguing for is a sane version of the Feng Shui archetypes or Shadow Run priorities system, not linear chargen. Something like distribute 4,3,3 to stats, 4,4,3,3,3,2,2,2,2 to skills, get traits worth 3,2,1, and flaws worth 2,1, a 3,2 background, distribute 24 XP how you like (with ...

I think the real problem is that Hasbro is a toy company. Their corporate culture is set up to deal with Star Wars figurines, Nerf guns, Fortnight Monopoly, and fuck you, put tape on your face . From the perspective of a toy company, the handling of D&D makes perfect sense: we've got a product, ...

There's no artist signature on the second one, I wonder if it was commissioned to be a legally distinct art work to avoid royalties or something That, or an audition piece by a new artist that someone decided they like better. Nevermind, same artist. There's a lot of things to prefer about the new ...

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Yes, such noticeably different head proportions.

She's about half a head shorter with a waist about 3/4 the width of the original, that's literally the difference between a skinny teenager and athletic adult, so yeah.

Actually I am way more impressed with those White Weenie lists, those are in are real sense more interesting decks from a deck design point of view. You might see a deck that brainlessly counts to twenty, but I see one that has been well tuned to resist opposing lines of interaction. The reason tha...

Maybe a game in which both players need to build something together - like creating a story, building an empire or solving a murder plot - and the winner is decided based on the degree of contribution to the success of the overall goal. Players would not be able to "damage" the other side...

Also people who have sexual hangups they're ashamed of and hope to repress are attracted to sexually repressive ideologies.

It might be fairer to say that the court asked for a specific type of evidence, McDonald's provided a different type of evidence, and the court decided to smack them around for failing to play by the rules. Reading the article again, it does seem fair to say that McDonald's really didn't do a good ...