The Gaming Den

Or like how you have to read the Balance skill to find out that trying to balance with less than 5 skill ranks makes you flat-footed. You wouldn't even know that spells like Grease and Sleet Storm can cause affected characters to lose Dex-to-AC without reading the entries for the spells, the balance...

Hasran Ogress was fine, 3 power for 2 mana with a drawback. Better than probably 80% of creatures at the time. But yeah, back then they were just trying to winnow out the most broken cards to get the game towards some semblance of fairness. Incidentally, 4th edition decks would stomp all over 5th, t...

Frank is basically spot on about the "good uncommons" thing. Ravnica had great cards in all rarities, but the uncommons in particular were a house. And the cards were just appealing; multicolor as a theme means that each individual card offers a lot of possibilities for deckbuilding, witho...

Zinegata wrote:The game is subtitled Duel of the Planewalkers after all.

Even if we ignore sets like Tempest and Mercadian Masques that feature the Weatherlight characters in new planes, or sets like Legends that include stuff from tons of different planes at once (like Segovia), there's still Homelands.

So potentially Essentials could have completely inconsistent rules after the first two books go to print? That would be, well, par for the course I guess.

If you play Munchkin in a really aggressive style (mess with people early and often, try to stop them getting to 2nd level instead of 10th level), then it does avoid the "circling the table with everyone at 9th" thing. It can, however, make the game drag at the beginning and everyone get ...

Pandemic is great, it's about the only new board game I've played recently that I wanted to go out and buy. Go is excellent, I strongly prefer it to Chess. A big part of that is how well the handicap system works, my dad is slowly moving from a 4 stone handicap to 3 against me (I'm more of a visual ...

The worst game is War. That's the one where you flip over cards and see who has the higher card, and repeat that until one or more players get fed up and quit. Never play this game. Munchkin is pretty lame too. It just devolves into one player getting close to winning, then everyone stops them, then...

This was simply because Andy Collins hated people who didn't fight with Greatswords. He straight up said so. He said that it was "wrong" for people to do more damage with two short swords (hence the Power Attack change) or a falchion (hence the crit change). Any chance of getting a quote ...

As I recall, the directions for shutting this off weren't exactly correct, but close enough that I was able to figure it out. Game On, fbmf Here's some quotes directly from facebook: If you opt out, your public Facebook information can still be shared by your friends to these partner sites unless y...

I can't imagine that they'd go for cryosleep when they could send embryos instead. Once you give up on sending individual people, you're just transporting genetic data. The most efficient way would be to digitize it and resythesize it on site, but sending a bunch of test tube babies and some robots ...

http://catalystgamelabs.com/2010/04/21/catalyst-game-labs-update/ And the shuffling of the deck chairs continues. I don't buy it for a minute. Hi, I'm new. I mostly plan to lurk, but I thought I'd at least contribute some to the discussion. That last paragraph is quite something: Finally, as some o...

RSS feeds for the win. I "follow" roughly thirty-five webcomics, maybe ten of which update on any reasonable schedule. Thanks to my RSS feeds, I just don't care about the ones that don't update. I just read what hits the inbox. I don't even bother with that. I have a bunch of webcomics bo...

What are the other good HM slaves? Krabby comes to mind. I had a buddy who turned Lapras into one. I felt horrified... I can top that. I only ever played Red and Blue, like a decade ago, so I don't know about all the new HMs or pokemon, but back when I used to play, I saw a Mew that had all four HM...

There are a couple other games that use the Fate/FUDGE engine. Spirit of the Century is one.

Their main website is here, it has links to the Dresden stuff.

The rules are generally solid, for more narrative style play. If you like D&D/wargame style tactical combat, you may be disappointed.

What would you remove or change to accommodate such a curriculum? History, perhaps? Students are currently required to take it continuously throughout their public education, and it's almost universally reviled...though, like pretty much all human knowledge, I'm sure it can be interesting an enligh...

Those all seem like pretty reasonable conditions. She's in high demand as a speaker.

On the subject, when she resigned as Governor of Alaska, people said she was crazy. Crazy like a fox, maybe. Sarah Palin Has Earned an Estimated $12 Million Since July.

Smeelbo wrote:Group Dynamic Functions: Kitchensink Fantasy Role Play?
Smeelbo

I would have guessed "Gaming Den Forum" for the first part, but I think you're right for the latter letters.

The problem with skill is king games is that there's no ramp up. Very few games actually encourage and enforce a ladder where people of similar skill can be matched and those who have higher skill teach rather than just bully others... -Crissa Right. Skill games tend to lend themselves well to tour...

That's the exact article I was thinking of. I don't see how "fairness" makes Warcraft worse. There are three basic models here: 1) Time is king. This is the Warcraft model, the idea is that playing longer makes your character better. 2) Money is king. A common asian MMO model, as exemplifi...

There are MMOs in China that make WoW look like Candyland. But yeah, "my computer works fine except it won't play WoW anymore" is about the best technical problem I could imagine.

1) you can expect to make most of your saves, instead of failing most of them.

2) damage doesn't scale much, but you gain significant hp each level up to 9th.

3) spellcasters get more & better spells.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:What was the deal with the monk btw? I never remember him being any good.

We banned the Monk after maybe 2 games of someone using him. As I recall, he added his two scores together for combat? Something like that. It gets out of hand surprisingly quickly.

In the past Wizards of the Coast has been very careful to keep Magic and D&D separate. They seemed to feel it would compromise one or both if they allowed any concepts to bleed over between the two.

Not anymore.