The Gaming Den

You won the fight, but thanks to that mad druid, none of you have the right complement of limbs any longer. It doesn't seem to be wearing off.

You have managed to disarm all the ancient traps and are now the proud owner of... a single thirty-three ton gold ingot. In the middle of a hydra-infested swamp. Surrounded by angry lizardfolk. Have fun spending it.

The giant pinata was hard, yeah. The worst one for me, though, was the boss of the Ancient Tomb. The tricks for his third and fourth stage are somewhat non-obvious, and randomly trying everything doesn't work because it's very difficult to get things right accidentally.

Man, I remember Oracle of Ages. Zelda is one of those series where I refuse to read the walkthroughs until I've beaten the game at least once, and some of those bosses took me days of on-and-off brainstorming before I figured things out. I really enjoyed that game, though.

A wizard tells you that he suspects that the powerful enchanters' guild has been making crystal balls that spy in the wrong direction. Spread the word.

Irrelevant, because we have to price and balance things against how good they can be, not how bad they can be. But you're already charging people points separately for attacks and defenses. If you're going to make the argument "unusual powers are potentially more useful", then you should ...

Most importantly, what the fuck is the point of classes if a Wizard 3/Druid 2 has the same spells as a Wizard 5 or Druid 5, and spells are (presumably) the most important defining feature of your class. Thinking about this a bit. [*]Separate BSBs for each class. Reduces to same situation as origina...

a defense is less valuable if the attacks it defends against are rare. Sailing and gardening useless in a desert campaign, hacking and stunt driving are useless in a low tech world. your magical message sending is likely interesting but ultimately worthless in a world where everyone has iPhones. Ir...

Prices are weird but not terribly high, so I'm guessing these are 1989 dollars. Weren't GURPS "dollars" a metagame thing like character points? No fixed relation to whatever currency is in-game, just arbitrarily valuable units of economic exchange used only for out-of-game stuff. I could ...

The interesting thing that I see about GURPS is that most of these problems can be solved by having a GM that knows enough to say "you can't do that". "Power now for power later? No, you can't do that." "Telecommunications magic is dominated by cell phones. You really don't ...

Side note: I find that it's generally a good idea to find some friends to play the Tales games with you. On top of the usual playing-jrpgs-with-friends benefits (streamlines lookups and planning, extra larfs), fights are a lot less aggravating when the casters aren't being morons.

Or. You catch a mutation. It doesn't stop you from fucking a whole lot. So it gets passed on. Once that mutation becomes part of a sufficiently large population, there are enough random trials being done that even minuscule effects on reproductive fitness start mattering. At which point things get ...

It's really, really hard to do technical stuff fast enough to keep up with four people writing nontechnical stuff. Eventually I'm going to have to stop with this remedial Design and Analysis of Algorithms course I'm trying to teach. I feel like I shouldn't have to explain how impractical storing you...

I definitely agree on the first point. Just say that it's four hits on a hacking test and one hour, or you have win a contest, or you have to play go fish with the DM, or whatever. However, I do think that we can achieve that goal without without so much as mentioning decryption. If we end up choosi...

But you can't actually use arguments about human past to discuss what is and isn't in D&D, and you can't actually use arguments about human future (or present) to discuss what is and isn't in cyberpunk. Except that this very forum has spent small textbooks applying modern economics to D&D. ...

Encryption/cracking itself needs to be fairly abstract, but the part where we tell people who try to port real-world mathematics and engineering into solving in-game technology problems to shut their gawdam mouths is not optional. I'll take it. Now we just need to actually follow our own advice it ...

Another long post. Whoopee. I'll put the important stuff at the top. Life without unbreakable crypto could look exactly like life does today. YES! I AGREE WITH THAT STATEMENT! But that statement is not what you said . The claims that you've been making are far, far stronger than that. If you'd just ...

Edit : reading that again, I'm pretty sure you weren't calling those two examples side channel attacks at all. If you weren't, then disregard the whole "those are bad examples" point, but I stand by my "you should use the word physical for clarity" point, because, well, you shou...

If encrypted files can be decrypted like they can be in the movies nothing bad happens . Seriously. Your doom speaking is totally unwarranted because there is nothing bad that happens to anything if you can't write a cipher that someone else can't potentially break. The issue isn't that you're decl...

There are Hox Gene sequences that are completely conserved between fruit flies, zebra fish, and human beings. They are completely conserved because one wrong nucleotide causes the entire organism to fail to form. Those genes are static now because the organism fails if they break now . But you know...

If you get an incomplete Dystrophin gene, your fitness is zero. You get muscular dystrophy and don't have any children. Evolution has mechanisms to find solutions to problems where incomplete answers go directly to a fail state. Acting like such mechanisms can't exist in mathematics is simply a fai...

First, because if you're designing a game like this you should design the game mechanics you want and then find a plausible way to explain it. Yes. This topic is broad and complicated enough that, no matter how crazy you want your mechanics to be, we can probably find fluff that will produce that c...

A vast snake slithers through the cosmos, and all the planes are on his back. Setting name: Planes on a Snake. Goddamnit. This would actually work pretty well with the "snakes are books" idea. Every idea in the universe is written somewhere on the Snake. Some ideas are bigger than others,...

This reads to me like it results in hilarious contradictions. You should totally have a faction that suffers from some sort of Article 9 contradiction, where they've simultaneously disavowed violence and aggression but have become party to several treaties which oblige them to assist others who are...

GURPS. Similar experience here. It was the most fun I've ever had with a character. I fit him right into the setting, and the build informed a mindset and history that was just so much fun to RP on top of being entertaining inside and outside of combat... but, looking back, if the DM hadn't tweaked...