The Gaming Den

Dungeons & Dragons, unfortunately. No surprise. It might now be the loss leader IP for WotC, but it gives nerd cred to keep it alive. They've been in Total Money Grab Mode for the past 5 years, with MtG drawing from the D&D well to sell cardboard and Digital "Assets". The new Hasb...

I've been gone for 7 years. Happy to see the place is still around. What's new? What are people playing?

I think Lago hit the main reasons why I generally dislike additional actions as a leveling mechanic. It can also get thorny to balance, but I think the pragmatic objections are more important. Maybe not everyone is like me, with the attention span of a gnat, but I hate it when I have to wait more th...

What Josh said.

ArcanoTech is fine, but a few (terrible) alternatives for your consideration-

AgnosTech

ElderCraft

EldritChraft

MysTech

Teknosorcery

I would be willing to back this project, but I'd need to see a lot of mechanics laid out in-full before doing so. If I'm going to pay that much for a game to get made, it needs to be something very intuitive, smooth and with a high depth:complexity ratio. We talk a big game here at TGD, but can we a...

Arkham Style. Have some flair, but mostly be straightforward.

Thanks for the responses. A few thoughts... The IV system in Pokemon adds nothing to the game besides making it a chore to raise monsters and disincentivizing keeping your original monsters around - which contradicts the themes of friendship. For that matter natures and EVs too. This is an excellent...

The same as the old thread, except totally different.

Examples-

Grinding. I don't like MMOs mainly because of their emphasis on repeating no or low risk encounters, over and over again.

Rewarding excessive specialization.

Too many triggers/modifiers. Arkham Horror, I'm looking at you.

They have an iOS game that teaches you, step by step, how to play tabletop Magic: the Gathering too, so that's a big plus for ease of learning. What would be the equivalent for D&D? I vaguely remember when 3e was new, they had some kind of flash app on the website that led you through a simple ...

Take a good board game, change some names and variables, and port it to the PC. Voila. The nice thing about that is that it can be 100% animation free,

I eagerly await ArkMatticus Horror.

Who the fuck cares, you pedantic coprophage? Did you pull out the thesaurus for me? Flattered. You, sir, seemed to have missed my point. It was not the most charitable reading. I will concede that there's at least a plan to get someone from not knowing a thing about MTG to playing, whereas for D&am...

the rules are much simpler and easier to learn (effort) :rofl: There's a huge problem with this argument, even if I allow that the rules of Magic are simpler and easier ( they aren't ). The rules of Magic matter. As in, for $$$ and airplane tickets. If you memorize the entire PHB like it's the Qura...

In some cases, you need to keep track of them constantly because the abilities are so good that you need to use them as often as possible, which lead to the game becoming a game of waiting for cooldowns Yes, one balancing factor is opportunity cost. If you have other abilities (with or without cool...

You may, of course, elect not to allow per level combat advancement.

Thanks for that, I actually laughed out loud. Toppest of keks.

This is why people play 3.x/Pathfinder, because it was the first sane system that did things in a way that made any kind of fucking sense.

I like cooldown systems too. XCOM: Enemy Unknown used a really nifty combination of cool down abilities and consumables. But the consumables were more like encounter powers: they restocked when you were done with an op, and returned to base. Cooldown systems also give designers a bunch of knobs to b...

I don't think any game more complicated than, say, FATE Core could maintain that kind of discipline for more than a year. Probably true. There is always someone that wants an ability that gives a bigger number. It also makes it really hard to include any kind of Ability Score bonuses AND level bonu...

A +1 is 1/20th of a d20 always and forever. Speeding up the rate at which +1's are dropping from the sky will not obsolete divergences, it will accelerate them. You'll have to tinker with the RNG in some way to get the effect you're looking for. Correct, even if the Fighter is getting +421 to hit a...

The more aggressively you fight bonus inflation, the more noticeable min/maxing becomes. This is true (as in 4E) unless you fight it to the point where there's literally no way to gain more than a 5-10% to-hit advantage on a character of equal level and the lost advantage is made up in some relevan...

Now could the fastest human outrun a black bear? Nope. Unlike any level 1 Barbarian with the Run or Dash feats. Well, once someone "takes a level" they are effectively outside of the realm of the real. Your other points are worth considering, although I really don't think any human could ...

citation needed Not that I really care too much about the argument for the sake of a fantasy game, but... Wikipedia cites (Brown 1993) for the following (emphasis mine): "Black bears are highly dexterous, being capable of opening screw-top jars and manipulating door latches. They also have gre...

I like an intricate character creation system (or list-building system or whatever) that lets you play around with different ideas - the kind of game where, if you made a video game based on it, I'd end up making a dozen different characters and playing through that way. I think most people who des...

From MtG I've always been a fan of Remand :rofl: That's my favorite (competitive) card. It's pretty amazing in Modern tempo oriented-decks. People: the AI is amazing. Not quite a "game mechanic" or "game action", but I dig what you're saying. It always feels really good to put d...

Basically, the things you do in a table top game (card, board, or RPG) that make you happy when you do them. I assume, for some people, there is a great joy in simply rolling a d20, looking at the GM expectantly and then doing some basic arithmetic to tally up the damage. I expect that for some peop...

In those the really "evil" things are alien beings who have become stuck on a world with Gods who enforce a very strict code of good and evil. Use magic = go straight to hell. The aliens have no idea what the code is, and their native psychology doesn't even allow them to understand good ...