The Gaming Den

Is there anyone in your group that genuinely likes the system, or is it just a "shits and giggles" thing?

We've done fights from a half dozen PCs fighting 100 orcs [..] How does it work on this scale? I.e., if time were not a factor, would the PCs generally be better off or worse off using the usual combat rules? The thing that annoys me about most mass-combat systems is that they assume a modestly-siz...

My #1 constraint for a mass combat system:

A unit of X NPCs should not be much stronger (or much weaker) than X-1 individual NPCs.

Always thought the Player's Handbook wasted too much space on spells, even though they're probably one of the things I like most when I got into the game. I'm curious if anyone has ever figured out exactly how much space would be saved if the damage spells in the SRD were removed in favor of a few ...

Your initial reply likened BitD to AW and that's a comparison. I don't see it. The mechanics of AW that has always bothered me is hilariously lampooned in Bear World. From my initial reading I don't think BitD has this problem but I admit that I don't know AW directly. I think the comparison betwee...

Gamma World was one of the original games of this type. The "Pure Strain Human" PC race was kind of like a D&D thief -- relatively weak, but necessary to get past certain dungeon traps (e.g. robots would only obey non-mutants). Of course, they also got the coolest loot like powered arm...

For most social rules, you need to say they don't work on leader types anyway. The King doesn't need to care you rolled 47 on diplomacy, nor will he fail a random morale check. That's not how I would phrase it. From my point of view, a Persuasion skill roll is used to skip over a social interaction...

I once played in a game of Blood & Vigilance, which is a set of superhero rules for d20 Modern. As a superhero game, it wasn't great but it was definitely miles ahead of plain d20 Modern and it had some interesting ideas. For instance, your PC would get a small number of power points (like skill...

Are there any games that never fall back to Attributes for task resolution? Define "attribute". In a previous thread, I said: "an attribute is a value you use for resolving skill checks when no other more specific skill applies". So using that definition, every game that has &qu...

Mostly unrelated, but Twilight 2000 also had an inverse relationship between attributes (which were randomly rolled) and skill points. I thought it was kind of a neat idea at the time.

I like FatR's list, although the last couple of items I don't really care about one way or the other.

Ancient History wrote:Fighter 5.

I guess if you don't display any class abilities, that means you're a fighter.

One roll per action is still way, way more rolling than I would want in an ideal system. I would rather have something much more abstract, like: Room description: This room has three guards on duty. Two of them are distracted by drinking and playing cards but one is suspicious and alert. Skill resul...

We won't get into the time-traveler Karl Treuherz or rat-duelist Svivomilo or any of that nonsense.

I have to admit that the first NPC I thought of when I started reading this part of the review was Karl Treuherz. What class is he? A ranger?

Harshax wrote: There are no advancement mechanics in Deities & Demigods, but the heroes described within clearly don't follow the rules presented in the Player's Handbook.

Isn't there one Japanese hero who is a paladin/druid (among other classes)?

Did anyone have the massive gilded tome linked to in the Grognardia blog above? I don't even remember starting this thread, by the way, but here is the character I rolled up during the playtest: Merlin the Wainwright STR: 7 (-1) AGI: 8 (-1) STA: 8 (-1) PRS: 6 (-1) INT: 11 LCK: 12 (add luck to spell ...

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I don't support kickstarter solicitations from big companies. They can get a damn loan like any other corporation. That might mean more if I've ever supported anyone's kickstarter though...

Owlcat Games is a big company?

talozin wrote: I suspect (though I've never played it) that Superworld was an even worse fit than Stormbringer was.

Superworld was a (mostly) point buy system and PCs weren't nearly as fragile. (I'm not an expert though -- most of my knowledge comes from dual-statted Champions modules.)

Games with random character creation can be a lot of fun, but if you approach them the same way you would a point-buy 3.x game, you're gonna have a bad time. One more thing came to mind about random character creation: In ye olde days, D&D was an outlier in terms of having characters grow (fair...

The fucking around with the 1:1 correlation of cause and effect though could discourage players from taking any agency, or at least any agency that results in fun. Yes, this is my first reaction to the idea of being "trapped in a nightmare realm". You need to encourage the players/charact...

Has anyone here actually played this? If so, did you obey the randomized character creation rules? We played some one-off sessions of it. Yes, we used the randomized character creation rules, although we might have missed some of them (for instance, I don't remember the rules about various body bui...

Runequest skills are a function of bookkeeping and profound disappointment, highly dependent on age. There is some ugly Runequest residue showing through, but mostly this game is just highly random. If you are below 25, all of your skills are -5% per year. If you are over 25 (up to 39), all of your...

We had the Stormbringer RPG boxed set and the Ringworld RPG boxed set when I was a kid. Say what you will about Chaosium, but they had some pretty cool licensed products!

No, that's about it. Even better, that corruption level puts you on the path of the mortal, meaning that as you level up, you can gain immunity to the things that could still potentially screw you over, like summonings, bindings and wardings. I am lukewarm on the path of the mortal. The ability to ...

Having looked through the book, it seems like the path to real ultimate power is: Step 1: Play a fallen angel with 10 corruption. Pick the feat Extra Skill (Sorcery) because why wouldn't you want to cast spells? Step 2: Raise your corruption to 11. Four cold-blooded murders should suffice, which in ...