The Gaming Den

If the government has a monopoly on the service, you don't actually have a currency peg, you just have a fiat currency and a listed price for a government service. The government can and does sell "forever stamps", and this is as close as you could get to a fixed price for a service. But ...

hyzmarca: Frank's basically right that pegging your currency to a service causes all the usual problems of a commodity-backed currency with some extra ones as well. Honestly, the big lesson from the current economic crisis is that pegging your currency to anything is rarely a good idea, even if the ...

Lago: suppose there was a game with ten classes, nine of which were exactly balanced with each other (and with the standard challenges), and the tenth is noticeably more powerful than the others. Suppose I'm making a new class for this game. Should I aim for it to be balanced against the first nine ...

Book ...10? IIRC....is 1 million pages of more Aes Sedai and other female channelers than you can possibly distinguish, spending the entire book glaring and scowling at each other. I think you mean every book is that. Beat me to it. Am I alone in wanting the books to just basically James Bond with ...

Duke Flauros et al: While there's obviously a huge case of confusion and contradiction here, the fact remains that everyone agrees, say, that monsters and players should all have a number labeled "AC." So there wasn't zero coordination. There was just really bad coordination.

Telegraphing the monster moves three or four rounds ahead of time for the players is just bad DMing and encounter design. It's a fucking dragon and just sending it forward with the assumption of combat is pretty boring. Resolving things in combat time does not require telegraphing the monsters acti...

hyzmarca beat me to it. You can go on a long rant about how some wizards gain their powers through years of painstaking study and others sell their soul to the devil and are level five next week. Knock a few years of the minimum starting age for characters who want to write pacts with the devil and ...

The math will be baked into the class and race. Since those are the only things that are 100% required for the game, between the two of them they contain all the math that we assume. :confused: ... So, those magic items that add numerical bonuses and are explicitly NOT part of race or class are... ...

Grek, that's closer, but as I read it Frank's suggestion was slightly cleverer than that. If there's a mine in Zone 2, when you move into or around in Zone 2 the mine rolls an attack against you. If the attack hits the mine triggers and you suffer the effects. If the attack misses you've avoided ste...

offense tends to stealth-increase That's totally consistent with what I said. The fact that it's a stealthy increase does not mean it is not actually an increase. But besides, look at his specific examples: DR and armor class. Those are matched by damage and attack roll. Damage is a number which ju...

@Lago, you are using a definition for "increase faster" that actually means "increases at the same rate." Nah, he's just pointing out that offense tends to stealth-increase in ways that designers don't notice, so when you look at your numbers for "offense" and "de...

In Christian teaching, "bearing false witness against your neighbor" is a commandment breach. That means that if you say falsehoods to or against other Christians, you are breaking one of God's laws. But you're not obligated to tell the truth to or about heathens and you're allowed to kee...

Frank, you are using the word wrong. You're talking about a pareto improvement--which just means "making at least one person better off without making anyone worse off." A Pareto Efficient or Pareto Optimal situation is just one where you can't make any pareto improvements--where making an...

Arguably you could call a strategy player more of a knot-cutter, but even still I don't feel like people who enjoy strategy want to walk in with an advantage, because the whole point of masterful strategy is creating the advantage through your strategy, not because you innately had the edge going i...

Vebyast, every time you write something, my eyes glaze over. Erp, sorry about that. I have some bad habits. What is modulo? " a modulo b " is a short, clear way to write "the remainder when a is divided by b". It fits into sentences slightly more easily. But you'd wanna add the ...

And even action points can totally be associated--you just have to write the fluff right. Which is part of the point; any mechanic can be associated with the right fluff, it's just that sometimes that fluff is stupid (e.g. Order of the Stick). But on action points, consider Mat from the Wheel of Tim...

That is: if all your encounter powers are limited because they don't work after they've been seen once, you can write rules that say a dude who wasn't in the room the first time you used it can get fooled again. That is, if it's a "fooled me once shame on you" situation, the rules should ...

Killing an at-level solo with your every-round DPR. Wait, what? Is this missing text about a stunlock or something? In the absence of save-or-dies and morale rules, every single encounter is won on DPR vs Healing advantage, and in 4e terms some characters are supposed to be the Strikers what bring ...

Swordslinger, I don't think you're really disagreeing with anyone. Some amount of dissociation in a game is a necessary evil; but that means it's a bad thing and if you can get all the same good stuff with less of it, that's good. The argument I think Frank is making is that 1) 4E martial encounter ...

On the push-pull thing, I suspect it depends on how creative the DM is with terrain. If you're fighting on a featureless plain it probably doesn't matter much. If you're fighting on the wandering planets in the elemental chaos that Gabe of Penny Arcade set up it matters a lot.

The whole signature weapons fight is mostly a sideshow to this. Some people objected that all characters should have the ability to guarantee they always get the same weapon, for aesthetic/signature weapons reasons. So Frank argued that signature weapons are kind of silly and not something worth go...

Ice9: This conversation has gotten so confused that not only has everyone lost track of what everyone else is arguing, but half the people have lost track of what they themselves are arguing, which makes it really hard to follow. As far as I can tell, Frank's position is something like this: Versimi...

Largely because of Frank's initial rant on how two-handedfighting is the default thing for everyone, and it's what casters do, so it doesn't need anything. And how "doing lots of damage" is really the path of two weapon fighting (with sources of extra damage, or just going for "more ...

No, I think in some ways Maj is asking the right question. Frank has been arguing that if you're looting weapons all over the place, your character can't really have an iconic weapon. Maj is arguing that if you want iconic weapons, you can't have looting. They're not actually disagreeing, really. On...

DSM: you agree that people don't have the power to narratively decide when the monsters are going to attack, hurt, or kill their character because it is a game, yes? OK: how do you feel about Fuchs' assertion that the player should be able to narratively decide what objects that monsters have in th...