The Gaming Den

The real question is, what does PF2 do well? What is its selling point? With any RPG you can find a dozen things it doesn't do well, that's no big deal. If the only answer is 'it does dungeon crawls with less variance between characters than D&D 3.x/PF1, and more depth than D&D 5e' that's ha...

Worst gay stereotype ever: reinforced.

I can see how the parry triggering an AoO could be missed. Parry to interact action, interact action to manipulate trait, manipulate to AoO - that's three degrees of separation. And most enemies can't do AoOs now remember, so the details of them may escape some writers. Good editing would be needed ...

They've got lists of hazards - traps, mostly - and here's a level 21 one (they have examples at 19 and 21 but not 20 exactly): second chance General 'level 20 extreme' DCs aren't something they have, no. I have to say it's hard reading through this. I don't think it's written for most people. Lawyer...

The advantage of a level-based system is that you can keep character abilities at least vaguely on par for combat, and if you insist there's nothing like the D&D fighter as an option then they should have some non-combat abilities too. With a character point/skill based system I've seen some mes...

Paizo would never have produced Pathfinder if the D&D 4e licence was workable for them. It's pretty clear that the people at the top in Paizo were happy enough with D&D 4e as a game, and that their new game replicates some of those design decisions (not that many though; there are new faults...

IIRC aura reading via auspex could pick up if you'd committed diablerie, though not who you'd offed that way. With the guy who liked GMing Vampire that I knew diablerie was a pretty firm no for PCs. Not sure about NPCs, I didn't read those books.

& yes we mostly played Vampions.

As I understand it the Federal Reserve or other countries' equivalent can influence though not control interest rates. Not inflation, at least directly. There are observable links from interest rates to employment rates and inflation, though the detail of the theories linking them sounds shaky to me...

So, here , WotC claims the following sales numbers for the Starter Kit (not the PHB): 2014: 126,870 2015: 91,190 2016: 123,990 2017: 185,580 2018: 306,670 Critical Role debuted in March 2015, Stranger Things debuted in July 2016, and D&D Beyond launched in August 2017. Those numbers look to me ...

For anyone who cares: the revised edition uses AC as a target to roll equal to or over (as in D&D 3.x) rather than the THAC0-esque stuff in the original SWN, but there's still an annoying number of roll-under mechanics to get used to. The modifiers your character can bring to a skill check are p...

There's a decent chance I'll be playing SWN either this Sunday or next. Are there any weird pitfalls I should watch out for, or anything like that?

This is spooky. Tussock is not, IMO, wrong.

Apparently there's a cricket league in Canada which has signed some big names from overseas (from places where cricket is a tradition). Does anyone actually from Canada care about it?

Uh. Just realised I wrote a combat scene plus a fight scene when I meant a combat scene plus a roleplaying scene. Sorry about that.

It's a lot better than the form of the dragon spell line which is native to PF, and by extension also better than PF's other polymorph spells. Does that bother you?

Assuming that min/level means a combat scene plus a fight scene & 10 min/level+ means an adventuring day unless travel is involved, has worked for me in the past without changing the number of per-day abilities.

That sounds more like ettercaps going around laying lots of webs (& imagined consequences of that) than like their magic creating webs and darkness automatically.

The number range isn't the issue usually. I do want something like 4 degrees of success (Pathfinder 2's crit success/success/fail/crit fail isn't the problem with their system) without an absolutely fixed chance of the more extreme results, like occurring on a 20 on d20 every time.

The Vandals didn't build stone fortresses with supplies to last years and space for people to live there for those years. The Therans and various other people of Barsaive did. Plus the Sea of Fire would leave marks physical and cultural for hundreds or thousands of miles around. Other little things ...

I'm sorry to hear about his death. No special insights though. My condolences.

The UK's parliament just voted on a series of 8 alternatives describing what goals to pursue with regard to Brexit. None of them - not no-deal Brexit, not stay in the EU and keep negotiating a deal which allows keeping all the EU benefits, and not anything in between - got a majority. Tossers.

I was worried when NZ's attorney general seemed to be backing away, but the govt did carry through with making semi-automatic guns other than .22s restricted weapons. It may not have any effect on most homicides but it should make massacres like that in Christchurch a lot harder to accomplish.

Working on a cyberpunk game, I'm working out how corporations could start exerting control on society the level of a government, and this has led me to wonder- Do prosecutors have complete discretion over whether to file charges or not? Could murder become de facto legal in a region if a prosecutor...

Govt. hopefully will just fucking ban the guns completely this time, the clean up after the previous Nazi shitshow down the road out on the coast just ended up useless with loopholes. Yes, this isn't the first one, won't be the last either I expect. Fucking fucks. If Australia could do it after Por...

Same setting: Golarion, where time advances at one year per RL year, and apparently there won't be a disaster to explain away changes the way D&D has done it in the past. Which is probably good.