The Gaming Den

Star Trek has a very unique flavor to its adventures so I think the lions share of the work you'll need to do is on automating adventure creation. How robust your character creation is will be meaningless if you don't provide detailed guidance on how a Star Trek adventure is to be made and what it w...

If one really wanted to track social status by realm I would recommend a series of tags ... And I would say. Sure take notes about these things. But taking reminder notes is not a mechanic ? Of course it is. Someone becoming Restrained who therefore "can't run" is a mechanic. Writing down...

The critiques of sticky social systems so far have been that they might make princesses fall in love with good hearted princes who all the animals love even IF he's in a pauper costume (which is good). That it doesn't track racism and have us decide how racist everyone is (which is good). And questi...

I'll pitch that trust mechanics, or most social mechanics for that part, don't need to go group by group. Trust, Leadership, Status, Favor: any stat you could use to track how much someone is given credence or held in disfavor by a community actually doesn't need to be measured by community. Humans ...

Those sound like After Sundown Shallows to me. Creepy places that if you go into them you enter a place where the rules of your reality are replaced by those of the spooky plane you're entering

That's not really a solution, you're just probably a skilled DM. If things are getting cluttered down with lots of extra npcs to handle it probably won't improve the situation to hand all those npc's to the person who's already handling the most npcs. I'd say one of the most boring things in D&D...

Yeah beam with Gizmoduck and Dewey

The difficulty with mysteries and investigations is not the mechanical structure with which they are resolved but the immense difficulties in constructing satisfying mysteries to investigate. The rules of the combat minigame would be the least of your concerns if every time you wanted to fight a mon...

For years I've loved Jake and Amir, a comedy duo who originated on Collegehumor. They have a podcast (If I Were You) and yesterday's episode had a song me and my friend wrote open and close the show and they plugged our Insta handles and the episode was named after me, and they joked about my name a...

The magic gem based reproduction doesn't hit for me. It seems like an enormous weakness for a species to have, like if a ship of kobolds lands on an island then I guess they're all dead within a generation? The hella-spicy food works though. Maybe kobolds can just barely taste it, unusually for rept...

Also just plain gamist inventions like the Gelatinous Cube and company is the reason the stacks of corpses and their kit vanish between dungeon expeditions, and it's invisible because that's why you didn't see it on the way out. I absolutely love that. I never thought of that and think that's reall...

Hey gang. If I wanted to play a game that is essentially AD&D with some updates and improvements what would be the names and games to check out for that? Something that does obvious things like getting rid of Thac0 or expedites the treasure rolling process so it doesn't take half the night. I ha...

Dwarves are played by people who don't have physical attractiveness as a part of their power fantasy. It's why dwarves are played by fat people. Women play halflings, chubby people play dwarves, gothkids play tieflings. These are things. Dwarves benefit is that they are a complete roleplaying packag...

Yeah it's actually got me experimenting with the rules a lot. Every time we've played I've re-tooled some part of the system or another. So I have some observations. First, combat took way too long imo. I always think the "minions go down in 1 hit" thing is an ugly kludge. I've used it bef...

Let's be clear that D&D's lethargic schedule was never a "deliberate strategy". Every person who's said that for the past 5 years is a brand apologist idiot of some kind or another. Companies can't rope-a-dope. Someone should pay Mearls to write a guide on how to remain employed despit...

Thanks guys, all of that is super helpful. The game is rather "long in the tooth" isn't it. Grek's "fuck abilities" thing really highlights that in my opinion. It's crazy that the most player facing part of the ruleset, the ability scores, are completely valueless. Say what we wi...

So I'm gonna be running some Mutants and Masterminds soon for the first time in a decade. There's a third edition out now which I've looked through. It seems to be virtually identical to second edition but I guess that's good for me cause I don't really need to learn anything new. I was wondering if...

Weiss and Hickman have always had pretty wild beliefs. They've basically always been 1 step away from writing those crazy christian propaganda cartoons you see. I would not be surprised if during the hard right wing christian shift in america of the last 12 years their writings have become TRULY buc...

All of Ars Magica is on earth so there stuff should be usable. I assume Vampire Dark Ages would also be usable material.

I'm trying to remember something from AD&D and I wanted to use you guys as a resource for how to find it. I remember in 2E there was a book that had a recipe to make some incredible potion that could do a ton of stuff including making you a mage. The bit I remember was that there was a potion re...

I actually really like DM and Krusks take. A wild magic system that told people "you can't plan your turn, you'll get a spell and then throw it and sometimes it will rule and sometimes it will suck but it will be a real spell" would actually be the only wild magic system that anyone would ...

You could honestly pick a sci fi rpg at random and you'd have a better time than Starfinder. Even Zin's negative assessment is too generous. Consider how much nerds are willing to bleed to defend their games even when they're dogshit and then, with that in mind, consider the fact that even on the ho...

I cannot imagine a more obvious demonstration of a failed social system than one where telling someone to kill themselves was as likely to work as getting someone to hold a briefcase if, and only if, that briefcase was the sign for an assassin for who to kill. And would switch from DC 39 to DC 3 dep...

Roog wrote:I ran up a quick excel spreadsheet to calculate effects of "best-of" rolls on the mean.

Thanks Roog, Grek too, that was very helpful.

Correct, re-roll and take highest. But yeah, no picking 1 die out of the 2d6 to just re-roll that one.

Yeah how many 2d6 rolls is roughly equal to a single 2d6 roll with a +X bonus.