The Gaming Den

he killed all the Dragon Riders (thereby removing their Light and Leadership from the common people) Show me one shred of evidence that indicates the Dragon Riders were Noble and Just and Clean and Caucasian Heroic and thus didn't deserve killing. Our only current examples are Eragon the Sociopath ...

Does anyone really care if playing a game is art?

If it makes you happy to call it art, go nuts. If your game crew is okay with that, good for them.

It's when you insist that I respect your game as being "better" than mine, or some weird shit like that, that I begin to take offense.

For some reason I am now reminded of the Evil "Emperor*" Galbatorix in the Eragon torture devices books. He's described as EVIL!!1! and everyone hates him, despite the fact that he doesn't seem to...y'know... do much of anything, least of all anything evil. Oh wait! He employs nonhumans, t...

Fuinny though that is, Koumei, your broken spoiler tag has warped the laws of time and space.

Good ends up being incompetent both because they do not understand the other team whereas Evil understands its own team and the other team This...this is complete garbage. Good wins precisely because it does understand Evil, whereas Evil cannot truly comprehend Good. and because they cannot or will...

Roy, I have come to the conclusion that I just plain don't understand you. You claim to be saying Evil > Good, but what I'm actually reading is Law > Chaos, or perhaps Evil > Chaos. You appear to have fallen into the trap that Good = incompetent. I will grant you the specific instance of an incompet...

But what then happens is that wizards load up on nothing but stunlocks and combat becomes anti-climatic. And this is different from normal...how? The wizard throws down a stunlock and the fighter/ranger unleashes an unholy ass-kicking. If the monster isn't dead, the wizard uses another one of their...

Acting in self interest is predictable. Acting in the interest of whatever real or imagined crap such as say... thinking you're evil, even if you aren't and stabbing you in the face... not so much. What?? Let me turn that around for you... "Acting in the interests of your fellow man is predict...

So you make sure all the stunlocks are encounters or dailies.

Define these terms. Crit: On an extremely good (or lucky) roll, Good Stuff Happens. You deal extra damage, or extra status effects, or insta-succeed, or whatever. Fumble: On an extremely bad (or unlucky) roll, Bad Stuff Happens. You drop your weapon, or hit an ally, or look like a chump, or whateve...

Good supposedly is more tolerant... except then the other guy doesn't speak your language (isn't good aligned) and therefore screws you over because you erroneously think you have him figured out. The good guy himself will turn on you in an instant if he thinks you play for the other team... even i...

So, crits and fumbles. Some gamers love 'em, some hate 'em with a burning passion. Some like crits and hate fumbles (although I've never met anyone who likes fumbles and hates crits). The pro-crit argument states that it models the occasional "lucky blow," and is dramatic and cool and such...

In D&D, you get rewarded for competence and punished for incompetence. Doesn't matter which team you play for - you just have to play well. True. That's one of the things I hate about the default D&D cosmology - good and evil are both "correct" choices, since both get rewarded abo...

Well, that's sort of the point...you have to fight through the mooks to reach the boss.

Note that it's not *all* the mooks; its the cluster of mooks that have attached themselves to the boss.

I like the idea. I think it would work well for 4e.

I'm not sure whether it woud work for 3.x...it seems that this would entail revamping the entire spell system.

Evil always wins, because good is dumb. Wrong. Also, evil gets rewarded as much or more. Depends on the setting. In general, evil gets the short-term power and luxury and long-term Crapsack Afterlife and being used as toilet paper by Asmodeus. Good gets the short-term Heroic Sacrifice and the long-...

most importantly doing good things doesn't affect the setting at all . This is true only if your GM is a total dick. Most GMs I know assume that if the PCs accomplish some great deed, the forces of evil take a hit. Hell, one campaign I ran the PCs destroyed and evil artifact and not-coincidentally ...

In FATE, mooks can attach themselves to a named character. They grant him bonuses and the PCs *can't* attack the main bad guy until they've taken out the mooks. In 7th Sea, mooks assemble into "brute squads" and act as one creature. They roll a number of dice equal to the number of mooks (...

A friend of mine was (and maybe still is) heavily into GNS Theory. I never had the heart to tell him it made no sense to me. He was a helluva roleplayer, but he thought too much. And apparently, instead of sticking within a genre's plot elements, narrativists create their own damn plot elements whet...

I agree that mooks have to have the potential - however small - to actually threaten the heroes, else they literally become set dressing. Mooks are supposed to occur in hordes because that's the only way they can threaten the heroes. If they can't even threaten the heroes in groups of 200...they're ...

As an aside, I always liked the idea that the library is only one part of an extra-planar museum. What else could one find in this museum? A menagerie of creatures born from every conceivable DNA sequence? Something else? Whatever you want. The real trick would be avoiding Traveller silliness Get a...

I would say that if a given feat is within the range of real-world human possibility - even including Olympic athletes, record-holders, and "Blackbeards" - it is not superhuman by definition. ~In 1991, Mike Powell jumped over 29 feet. ~In 2004, Hossein Rezazadeh clean jerked 580 pounds. ~I...

Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles Pirates of Dark Water Garfield and Friends Reboot Sonic Bump in the Night Looney Tunes Mario Brothers Geeker The animated Addams' Family Captain Planet Conan Mighty Max Superhuman Samurai Cyber Squad To this I'll add... X-Men Thundercats He-Man She-Ra (shouldn't that b...

"Beyond the realm of action movie plausibility." If you saw something happen in an action movie and it made you go, "Oh come on! No one's that strong/agile/fast/smart/whatever," then I consider it to have passed beyond the realm of "larger than life" into "supehuma...

Hey! No bad-mouthing of Dino-Riders!

Hey Shoggoth. Welcome to the Trial By Fire.