The Gaming Den

I'd happily listen to whatever you have to say about 3E. It's hard to get genuine feedback about how it plays now. I won't pretend that I've played it, but upon reading I see that they have still not attempted to fix the following fundamental problems in their approach to system building and gamepl...

Exalted is a very rules-heavy game. Most of those rules are for combat and activities directly tied to combat, like movement and stealth. Heck, until 2E subsystems for anything else hardly even existed and in 2E swords explicitly trumped words. Combat is not very interesting to roll through for anyo...

In my opinion it solves none of the fundamental setting and gameplay problems and mostly does not even attempt to. I can elaborate later, if anyone cares. I was never motivated enough to dig into mechanics below basic gameplay assumptions. Also I'd note that it is a walking corpse of an edition, jud...

2E: Run a combo each round and perfect defend everything, because passive defenses are pretty much 100% non-viable in the Solar league, your manapool is your health bar. 2.5E: Passive defenses are semi-viable, so use them by default and if your passive defense fails to filter out an incoming attack,...

I can think of another reason no one will ever play this arc: people don't play villains so that they can have "heroic arcs". I understand that my own personal set of data is pretty limited, but in my experience people do not sign up to play characters from card-carrying, baby-eating bad g...

Evil Primordials were just fine, one of the best parts of the setting. Their original incarnation from Games of Divinity, that is. But most things in Exalted only were fine only while description remained vague enough. And that was particularly true of eldritch abominations, like the hivemind hell-c...

Edge of the Empire does mega damage x10. The problem is of course in the fact that in Star Wars being on foot and being in a spacecraft are two relatively distinct states, and the setting does pretty good job preventing a party from just using vehicular weapons to paste all opposition. In DnD, unles...

And regarding the original question of the thread. One of the unspoken assumptions throughout DnD world-building and adventure-writing was that heroes' power scale went to the heights of maybe Conan the Barbarian++. That was one of the reasons why getting into kindgom-building and politics was consi...

Why did you choose such an bad example? By book 1 the main chars are not high level Well... duh? That's why the series has a power progression. and they do have political problems later in the series? Around 90% of which are resolved by doing some heroic deeds that convince everyone that the main c...

I'd like to second the opinion that changing the fundamental core of the gameplay mid-progression is just a good way to make most of your players drop the game. Furthermore, if you actually examine popular stories that feature a massive powerlevel progression, you'd note that their core elements do ...

A project update: (1)Finally, all the intended subsystems, including social stuff and domain rule, or at least their alpha versions, are in place, now the goal is to write enough monsters and hazards to provide a proper framework for high-level powers that character should wield. (2)Throughout this ...

Honestly, a break with the tradition, and trying to update DnD to be more in-line with the currently popular fantasy products was not a bad idea. But the new stuff they replaced old stuff with needed to not be shit. And over-enthusiastically aping WoW and WoW alone demonstrated shallowness of their ...

Ah, it's complaining time once again! Okay, on the subject of WotR. I just so happened to read through the second adventure of the path recently because I was dredging books for ideas of demonic antagonists. The adventure mentions repeatedly, how redemption is important to this story, and that heroe...

If you translate these design goals from Marketing to English, you will get approximately the following: "We want to sell you fifty books worth of fiddly mechanical shit we generate without thinking all over again, and we don't want to actually work on it either". If I had to rewrite PF1, ...

I wouldn't say that 5E is, strictly speaking, terrible. If given choice between not playing/running anything and 5E, I'd choose 5E, while the reverse is true for 4E. It just does not offer anything that would make me prefer it over 3.X iterations of DnD, while being plagued by a good deal of stupid ...

Having your system outlive your direct intervention is, literally, the only win condition in nation building in real life. Everything else is a bonus objective; if your project cannot outlive you, you've failed. And no system had existed for as little as 300 years - which is how long certain races ...

I'm not sure what to answer to a person who keeps asking me "but what the party would do if fate of the world was not determined by heroes but by my concept of social dynamics?" after being told no less than two times in very straight words that the fate of the world is in fact determined ...

Look dude, if the setting pitch text literally says to you point blank "the cause for the decline is the lack of characters of high enough level, who can make sufficient DCs, cast high-level spells, and reliably ward off certain threats", only in more flowery words, I feel the answer to qu...

Why build if all will fall apart eventually? Why enjoy life if you're going to die? Why adventure in DnDLand if you cannot defeat all evil forever (shit, in most settings as intended by authors you cannot even make any lasting dent in forces of evil or prevent regular world-breaking events, though t...

This is a reasonable note. To explain in just a bit more detail for now (though I hoped the pitch would be able to get the point across in the last paragraph) the setting is envisioned as a series of circles, from the heartland, where law and order mostly hold, and you play the games of political in...

And partially as an answer (though I wrote this fragment down yesterday): The World and its Tone: High Adventure The world of the Twilight Age is a world of high fantasy and high adventure. Magic and weird science may no longer march forward today, but at the heart of civilization wonders and miracl...

I really don't care about your modern political hang-ups. If you cannot recognize a clear reference to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (or most of the successive Chinese dynasties... or most of the successive Caliphates...), I don't see that as a problem I'm responsible for. Moreover and mo...

As I keep GMing this system, filling in monster manual, I'm also writing down the more specific setting. Here's a short 500-words pitch for the concept: The Twilight Age Since the dawn of ages, since the time when the first realm of the first sapient race erected the first building on the Hollow Wor...

I have to thank all the people who read carefully into the math. I've tried to get into PF 2, started to write down points for a review, and then I get to feats lists, with 30+ fixed choices per level 1-20 career, most of which give utter bullshit like conditional +1 damage and make Weapon Focus see...

A few notes after reading the first chapter of the playtest rulebook: - Managing three actions (and one reaction) each round, with some of the possible actions costing more than one action (totally not confusing because they named those "activities", you see) is likely to cause no end of m...