The Gaming Den

Rules-heavy RPGs usually have a tactical combat minigame and a pile of character creation rules that output your stats for that minigame. I don't see the point in doing this unless the CR system is spot-on. Having agreed upon combat rules makes sense - it lets everyone speak the same language - but ...

Is there a procedure for upgrading a dungeon crawler into an RPG? I like Imperial Assault a fair deal more than I like any version of D&D combat. Do you just bolt a skill system onto it and call it good enough? Is something else missing? (Bonus question: My favorite one of these is actually Cata...

Is it a magical or fairytale goat? Are magical or fairytale goats allowed in your setting? If yes to both, it's very neat. Otherwise, I'm wondering why the astonishing speed of big goats hasn't reshaped all of society. A talking cat tries to sell your party magic beans (he's lying, they're just bean...

One of the things that I was surprised about when researching hex and counter games is that they only track numerical advantages in whole number ratios like 1:2, 1:3, and 1:5. Most subtle ratio I saw was 2:3. And this is a really grognardy realism-obsessed genre, so if it's good enough for them it s...

Did you know that a not insubstantial portion of tabletop players do, in fact, like playing classes that are explicitly hot dogshit? It weirds me out when I see people homebrew really weak material, since I can't tell if they did it because they don't know how to play the game, or they want to eat ...

Chamomile is right - if you're going to have a death spiral, at least let it be one that keeps the game moving instead of one that grinds everything to a halt. The action movie stories that people want out of wound conditions don't actually sound like death spirals though. People want the story wher...

I had a nice realization - whatever single number things roll up to for operational scale battles should be the same thing as the CR-equivalent for tactical combat. They both have the same definition: some curve of percent victory chance that's 50% chance of victory when the two numbers are equal. [...

There's nothing stopping you from explicitly cross-listing narrative and real time durations. Especially if you have standardized durations, which you should anyway. per scene / recovered with a 5 minute rest / lasts 5 minutes per session / recovered with an 8 hour rest / lasts 8 hours Then you can ...

Worth The Candle uses "Polity" as their generic nation-word. It's grown on me. You don't get copy pasta versions of those in your border garrisons. Going from a more abstract representation to a less abstract representation requires making shit up, so this is a place where part of the rule...

I did some research into hex and counter wargames when thinking about mass combat rules. They have these scales (nomenclature is not consistent): [*] Man to man: What we're used to in D&D land, one counter is one soldier. Rare. [*] Tactical: A counter represents a bunch of similar soldiers (simi...

Redlining wouldn't have had such a negative impact on black Americans if the government backed loan policies it excluded them from didn't work in the first place.

I agree with Dean - HP is the default, and usually you should use it just because your audience is familiar with it. And it's a decent default. If you start totaling up all the things people say they want out of an HP system for a D&D-like game (combat heavy heroic fantasy), you hit a mathematic...

Power law distributions are nice for that sort of arbitrarily spiky distribution. 5 out of 6 underground hexes can support 100 families on cave agriculture, 5 out of 6 of the remainder can support 5x that, 5 out of 6 of the remainder of those have 5x as many as that, etc etc. That is, start with 100...

But, a TGD leftist reading list could actually be pretty helpful and interesting. I'm not a big theory person, so: [*] No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey. (Though her interview at CurrentAffairs gets there more succinctly.) [*] Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox For...

No? It's a fairly common thing to want to split off that way, and you didn't mention making a Pokemon game.

Regarding modeling fantastic options: Many things are just going to be a sizeable bonus to some stat or another. Got warg riders for cavalry? They eat twice as much and they get twice the shock bonus when they charge. Those are the easy ones. Maybe it's helpful to remember that you can't trust your ...

You're using the slots to guarantee things like having combat and non-combat utility, right? Like you can be a Fighter/Courtesan or a Fire Mage/Fop but not a Fighter/Fire Mage? If so, I think you need some provision for a class to take up multiple slots. Some concepts (shapeshifter, illusionist) nat...

hyzmarca's post has an extra unquote tag.

Having a map allows a huge amount of extra depth without a lot of rules. We all have the capability for spatial reasoning already. Compare these two rule excerpts: The character is adjacent to the monster. The character's x coordinate plus the character's size plus one is greater than or equal to th...

Why do people of, let's just say a nerdly persuasion gravitate so hard towards Libertarianism? Two major reasons. First, from before: I do have one good thing to say about libertarianism: It is probably the simplest theory of government. You can start with just property rights and with only a littl...

Boy, it's hard to see "secretly is the princess" as anything other than a complication which pays off at higher levels - and those are doubleplus ungood. A problem that's so big that it becomes the focus of an entire session (and then settles down) isn't really a plus or minus in terms of...

Miniatures Handbook also gave us one of the component parts of the Hulking Hurler build, which is one of the more entertaining things that came out of the character optimization scene. I haven't seen reactions keep players engaged in practice. I've seen a lot more of them causing additional breaks t...

I'd have as few power to threat matching scales as possible, ideally one. It's just hard to make threat books that multiple axes well. The more axes there are the more opportunities for the threat-writer to mess up there are, and there's a tendency towards making all the numbers roughly the same siz...

I do have one good thing to say about libertarianism: It is probably the simplest theory of government. You can start with just property rights and with only a little bit of tortured logic you can bootstrap that into some semblance of most other rights. That's pretty neat. @Dean: Your understanding ...

In any case, the basic mundane resources are Koku, Gold, and Manpower. A Koku is enough food to live on at a low level, which means that it trades for roughly 1 Gold per month. Manpower requires Koku even if it's slave labor and basic labor gets 1 Gold per month. Manpower allocated to a project nor...