The Gaming Den

Alright I'll come clean If I understand correctly, you're taking your existing homebrew campaign/system and running sessions with various mechanics and subsystems swapped out to study the player reactions. If that's the gist of it, that's a great idea and definitely how RPG development should be do...

Chamomile did a nice writeup on mystery adventures in his blog . He suggests building a directed graph where nodes are scenes, edges are clues, and each node has at least three edges. The total size of the graph and the length of the shortest path to the conclusion give some sense of how hard it is...

What's the stuff that makes you want to make a new fantasy heartbreaker? Are there systems that you think have never been done well before (like me and CR)? Do you just want to do some RPG content writing and need a framework to dump that into?

Depends on what you're trying to make? Not just in terms of what will gel with what you want to do, but also in that if there's something you feel strongly about or enjoy writing, you don't need a system that's good at that, because you're going to replace that system entirely. For example I think p...

Fate-style compel mechanics could work for intentional failures. Particularly the sort of bartering aspect, where the GM might bribe you with more points because they have a really good idea where the failure goes, or refuse to give up points for a boring failure. I really like your idea of failures...

Auto-succeeding at things your character is Good At is underrated. Too many games set expected success rates close to 50%, which makes characters feel cartoonishly incompetent and slows the game down by inserting a significant chance that nothing happens. Plus resolving auto-succeed abilities is so ...

Mandatory sleeves is another solution for decks of double sided cards.

It's a bit heavy-handed for a one-off mechanic like MtG transformations, but if that's the entire game, well.

On the topic of monster complexity in 3rd: the stat block has multiple lines of lists of references to other rules. Special attacks, special qualities, feats, plus sometimes spellcasting and spell-like abilities. Sometimes the items in those lists are just flavor, or things mandated by the monster c...

Those are neat. Having flipping on the objectives as well fits with the rest of your themes. What if you combined that with shared objective cards? Like... achieving an objective means you flip it and give it to the opponent, who might flip that side and give it back. With the goal being to not have...

I think the grognard realism standard is "Can I imagine a buff everyman flavored 80s action hero doing this?" Which lets you ignore a whole lot of facts about human fragility and make up whatever you want for damage output, but caps out pretty quickly for other things like, say, feats of s...

You did a neat job of conveying an interesting world out of very few mechanics. From a game design perspective, I think you'll have to treat being in the Otherworld as a resource to some extent. Like if you expect most combo/engine decks to share a bottleneck of getting cards to the Otherworld, that...

You can salvage the ace trainer by making their shtick be "Good at type advantages" instead of "Good at Pokemon." Class features for things like increased damage super-effective hits and decreased damage from things they resist. That still outputs people who go around obsessing o...

Homebrew on /tg/ was at its best when it was small silly systems or brainstorming about gonzo settings. Something Tome-like would never fit on an image board with transient threads, but there's more to RPGs than serious additions to rules heavy systems. I always enjoyed the anonymous, transient natu...

"Scorched" is volcanic evil lands? I think you need some sort of "marginal plains" option(s?), like steppe and badlands, since those are where Mongol hordes and orcs live. And these are the bread and butter enemies in a kingdom building game. I'd also recommend splitting water te...

/tg/ is in such a sorry state because when it comes to media nazis only care about determining a cannon that they can venerate. They want to consume culture in the most correct way from the most approved creators. Homebrew and critical discussion are antithetical to the nazi ethos. They're also the ...

The idea that companies are run based on output or profitability is an outdated fiction. Only the owners care about profit. Only the lowest level employees are conned into caring about their output. The vast majority of decisions are made by middle managers, and they're rewarded by being useful to t...

I like critical analysis of games and their design. That's pretty rare these days, and most of what's out there is god awful. The Den is one of the exceptions, so I come here to scratch that itch. The forum would be better with a little less negativity, but it's natural given that the state of RPG d...

If 15 minutes of weakness is still entertaining then magikarp can be weak for 15 minutes. We don't need to assign timescales to things that aren't fun.

I don't think there's a one size fits all solution for bad / joke pokemon. It's okay for Delibird and Luvdisc to suck, and I think that works for anything that doesn't evolve into something somebody cares about. Delibird at least has an amusing hook in that it can be carrying whatever is funny in th...

In deciding to make an initial playtest version, what are some general good principles? Know what you intended to make, what you actually made, and how to tell the difference. Know what you're testing, what you're not, and how you intend to check on those things with a playtest. What kind of number...

There's sort of an awkward mix of general-purpose features (gills) and species-specific minutia (Shuckle is a juice machine) in here. That's fine and good from a game-mechanical standpoint, but messy from a book layout and typography standpoint. It'd make sense to move all the exclusives to the poke...

End-of-life 4th Edition (errata, math fixes, all of the options) is better than 5th Edition as it currently stands. There, I said it. Sure, 4th Edition was a broken mess with no rules except for combat mechanics, but the tactical minigame for 4th Edition is much more interesting than 5th Edition. 5...

That specific Dragonite is huge though. They're usually pictured as a little bigger than humans:

Frank: that's a great list of questions. Almanac: i agree with all your answers. It is my opinion that every single Pokemon is someone's favorite, and I think it's valuable to be able to use your favorite Pokemon and not get fucking bodied for it. I should be able to take a Butterfree up against the...

The video games have psychics and people who train martial arts with pokemon. If you imagine these people are any good at what they do, it's not much of a stretch. The Pokemon Adventures manga might be the most D&D-like version of the franchise. It has a fair deal of tough humans, lots of indivi...