The Gaming Den

As far as I can tell what went wrong was... 1. Square's non-Final-Fantasy team is assigned to work on a sequel to Chrono Trigger. 2. One or a couple of the creative leads go to the suits and fight to be able to develop a new IP instead. They get the greenlight. That's Xenogears. Xenogears is really ...

100%. I love when they're fleeing the Town Guard, and a rando dwarf falls out of an alley and starts running with them for no conceivable reason. He's just the guy who missed the first session.

This game's chargen looks positively frosted with White Wolf DNA, so let's see how it did at fixing some of White Wolf's infamous problems: So Coyote and Crow has 9 stats and they range from 1-5. They have 3 physical abilities, 3 mental abilities, and 3 spiritual abilities. I've got a theory that ev...

Call me if they commit to rewriting the Monster Manual. Preferably with monsters built on the same class+level math as PCs and abilities to actually fulfill their roles in the setting, but *any* kind of consistent design goals or editorial oversight would be an improvement. If all they're doing is R...

I'm on the spectrum myself, if it makes a difference. *shrug*

Rereading old Planescape books and snarky reviews thereof makes me realize how much my teenage self loved anything that had Tony DiTerlizzi's art. I was a huge Planescape fanboy and tried to run it way more than my friends wanted me to. I got way madder than I should have at 3e going way out of its ...

AD&D PHB pg 25, bottom left. It was absolutely a thing, all the old SSI Gold Box video games included it. Hey, so it was! Thanks. So, ok, there was a rule, but the AD&D version was watered down enough that it would almost never come up as a way to lawnmower through mooks. Even if you're lev...

https://dmdavid.com/tag/the-obvious-innovation-in-fifth-edition-dungeons-dragons-that-no-designer-saw-before/ Ugh. Is there anyone who blogs about a technical topic and has anything interesting or insightful to say? I can't even say "well, TTRPGs have a culty anti-intellectual culture and ther...

According to Google Translate, killCAM in English is killCAM.

Atavism: I like Atavism as a name, especially with the explanation that people in the setting associate it with reverting to a "primitive" state. I actually think you're good on unintentionally stealthing in racist tropes here, because: #1: It's goofy old-timey racism that modern people w...

I think the elephant rifle thing is fine. I mean, Chicago PD has fucking tanks and Chicago is still the default setting for V:tM. I don't know what your mechanics look like, but especially if you want badass mortals to be relevant you could focus on superhuman avoidance rather than superhuman durabi...

Did Golarion make a god responsible for that shit? I preferred the default excuse where it was up to the individual person on an instinctive level, sort of like "deciding" whether to become an undead. Still not Wall of the Faithless bad. I think I just don't like gods in fantasy as anythin...

Oh sure, when I said "blame Tolkien" I was being a bit tongue in cheek. It's not personally his fault that people forget he was a professor of languages (twice) or that that might be an important factor in creating languages. If there were to content themselves with aiming lower (much low...

Lot of really good points here, thanks for this.

I wasn't imagining every race having a special speech pattern or anything. My point was why not just have them all speak the same language since that seems to be what everyone wants to do in practice. I mean, if you wanted to do like a sibilant hissing voice for lizard men or a growly voice for mino...

Errrrrrm...yes, but handle with care. If you are using accents from the real world for monsters, you can't avoid equating the people using those accents with monsters. People make this mistake all the time. I think I'm talking about just dwarves here. (And not gully dwarves, because fuck Dragonlanc...

Dear Abby, I don't like the way languages work in any RPG that isn't set on Earth. Let's look at D&D because that's what everyone copies. Most of the languages are racial things like "Goblin" or "Dwarven" where all goblins speak the same language even if their cultures haven'...

9 year old me couldn't figure out why D&D had a d3 but not a d5. I'd imagine people could handle rolling 1d10 and dividing by two.

Since this is the Ask Chamomile Questions thread, what's your design process and DMing style like when you DM for money? Do you pretty much treat it like normal DMing, or do you go more out of your way to tailor the campaign to the players? If you're running a system you wouldn't normally run do you...

I think a 5e rewrite that actually got finished would come out as a whole new D&D clone anyway. Username17 said he stopped working on the Tomes because it was turning into a whole new game and the massive pile of work that entailed, right? And that's 3e which is a lot more inheritance based and ...

I hope people want those things and charoppers get pretty far up their own ass sometimes, but I don't see how that follows from 5e.

Step 1 : Come up with a unified theory of how monsters work at X level, with clear numeric targets and expectations for what kinds of abilities players can respond to.

Step 2 : Rewrite the entire Monster Manual.

Step 3 : Yeah fuck this.

Links related. Somebody gave up their dreams to work in advertising, made a cooler commercial than the product deserves, has hopefully since left the corporate world behind to live in the wilds of North Dakota among the bigfoots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8QKK5IDSXE It doesn't sound like you'...

Unfortunate political overtones aside, this take on the City of Brass sounds really cool. It's rare to find high level adventures that feel "epic" and seem like they could work with high level caster PCs. The fact that we could join forces with actual Lucifer is just icing on the cake. Fin...

Since it sounds like this module is a pile of right wing talking points, there is between a 100 and 120% chance that those night hags are supposed to be Cardi B.