The Gaming Den

The tag system doesn't make the single die roll to the king's most trusted ally any more comfortable for people. Then these people are idiots who don't understand action-adventure fiction. People making fast friends with powerful people who want to help the heroes or put the heroes' talents to use ...

Rogue One being the best Star Wars movie in decades spells major trouble for the franchise. [*] There was no new technology introduced to the franchise. [*] There were hardly any aliens. Definitely no new ones. [*] There was no Force Powers besides that used by Vader, aside from an intentionally amb...

While I don't think this solves the problem people actually have with die rolling into grand vizierdom The thing is, I don't think people actually have a problem in abstract with player characters going from riffraff off of the street to grand vizier/crown prince/lead general after impressing the m...

It's insulting because it's such an unoriginal and desperate allusion to a pivotal scene in the 2nd movie. I mean, Jesus, can you telegraph your intention to be the REAL TRUE STAR WARS PRETTY PLEASE LOVE ME more than doing that?

Anyone else here flat-out insulted by the fake-reveal of Rey going to the Dark Side? A) It's just a fake-out. This shit is just stupid. Aside from being completely unoriginal, it's also not believable. B) It's not a fake-out, they actually mean to go through with it. While this is actually kind of b...

Having OAs be a thing that only certain monsters and classes have only screws over players and people who didn't read the monster manual. It doesn't even really speed play up, because if you didn't read the DM Notes, you may as well treat every monster as if they had OAs. Even if you 'know' that hob...

One thing that people seem to like about PF2 is getting to use their movement without AoOs getting in the way often. Even if this anecdote wasn't a textbook case of selection bias, I think this is bullshit. People always ooo and aaa about 'action' scenes like Dragonball Z and Sword Art Online and J...

I am strongly against using a talking minigame to do what you described. It's just a self-contained positive feedback loop that rewards people with the best bonuses regardless of roleplaying context -- which is what this system is trying to avoid!

This kind of just seems like you made a writing prompt than solved some deep issue with the system. That's the goal. People get offended if you, an otherwise qualified courtier PC, simply roll a d20, add generic modifiers, and then tell the king to make you court vizier. People don't get offended a...

For important characters, you'd just assign them the traits as part of statting them up. For characters who weren't previously important (for example, a PC tries to schmooze an anonymous city guard into investigating a rival merchant), you can just randomly roll them. As for finding them out, you ca...

So, here's a fundamental problem with diplomacy as Frank pointed out. If you're trying to convince the elven queen to enter an anti-illithid alliance with the dwarves, it should be easier if she's wise (even if she's racist) and harder if she's foolish (even if she's tolerant). If you're trying to c...

Fire Emblem 7's biggest problem is that it dared to do something new for an audience but also didn't go far enough. The Fire Emblem formula works especially poorly for FE7's plot where you have dueling conspiracies of small groups of people to avoid a 'there was this BIG WAR' plot. How many Black Fa...

The thing I dislike most about about the Mythos works being set in the 30s is that the settings don't add anything. Like, if the Mythos were set in a historically relevant period like the Golden Age of Sail or the 1st Industrial Revolution or the French Revolution or the Age of Imperialism, I could ...

Sorry, I strongly disagree with the idea that Mythos is a bad fit for Sci-Fi. The movies Alien and Aliens exist. Case closed.

Frank brought up a really good point in the review. WHY are Mythos Games so obsessed with pre-WW2 / post-Victorian aesthetics so much, aside from the fact that this is where the original fiction takes place? But that doesn't make any fucking sense. Most of Batman's mythology was laid down in the 194...

A new Fire Emblem came out and it's turning out pretty good and selling like hotcakes and you're still complaining about the old games? 1) Did you fucking forget what board you're posting on? 2) The reason why I am complaining about FE6 and FE7 is because they have an undeserved status for excellen...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtFhorR1VIE <-- while I don't care much for the Mr. Plinkett imitation, this series does do a pretty good rundown on why Fire Emblem 7 is probably the worst game, story-telling wise, in the franchise except for Fates. But going back to Fire Emblem 6 again... the game ...

I suppose the superiority or inferiority of either Drain system depends on what you're going for. I like Shadowrun's system specifically because spellcasting becomes tense at dramatic moments, like after you've been injected with drugs or you're debating short-term survival versus medium-term surviv...

If there aren't any real edition wars AND people aren't converting to the new product, it means that your product is a dud because no one cares enough about it to become emotionally invested or compete for mindshare. I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that edition wars are a prerequisite to h...

Into The Breach is super fun and largely built out of 2 damage + push 1 type abilities . You can easily build a great game on those mechanics, 4E just fails at it because it fails at most things. My emphasis. Are you shitting me up the ass? I don't disagree that you had fun, but Into the Breach is ...

The Drain spellcasting mechanic in Shadowrun. It's such a simple setup that completely changes the way mages play in Shadowrun versus every other game. I'm seriously surprised no other major game uses it or even tries to use it, even hardcore OSR-style games that pride themselves on being hardcore.

Not to get in the way of your epic rant, but stuff like this makes me chuckle. I understand why a lot of people had experiences like this and I also understand why lots of people didn't find this to be the case at all and that 4E classes were really varied at the table. Those boring pushes and pull...

The problem I was trying to get at is that even if WotC went all-in with producing 50 new classes per year, the limitations of the 4E D&D system would've made it fruitless anyway. It took us only 30 new classes until we got stupid bullshit like the Ardent and the Binder. Can you imagine how inef...

But if you somehow got a clue that pointed *only* to innocent people, and had to figure out that the clue itself was no good, that would be awful. And in many people's minds, that's what a red herring is and should be. 1) Excluding bad clues is just as important to the feel of a mystery as pursuing...

Aren't red herrings likely to develop organically, as players miss the important clues and focus on some worldbuilding or padding? Not all red herrings are equal. Some red herrings are in fact clever foreshadowing. [*] Just because a lead is a bust doesn't mean that it can't advance the plot. A bad...