The Gaming Den

Every M&M game has the "alien spaceships" plot twist happen somewhere. Because the setting is "fantasy-like worlds deliberately created and nurtured by a race of sci-fi progenitors". But they don't tell you this up front, so in your first game it's always a surprise when you ...

Because he used CON or because it was a magical item? Because I wouldn't mind flavorful classes that use other stats for casting spells. Raistlin's origin story includes his health being shattered and getting a unique magic staff. It was a situation that called out for 4e's 'exception-based design'...

Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archives series uses gemstones as currency (growing out of their use as, essentially, magic batteries). If you want to steal the system there's a writeup here; he calls them chips, marks, and broams in increasing order of size.

It's actually pretty straightforward to generate a Mew to catch, and not that difficult, but it requires you do do something very specific. (You wind up loading the special stat value of a pokemon you fight into memory that determines the pokemon that will appear in a certain random battle).[/url]

I had one professor who would write things like "[backwards E] ! X" to mean "there exists a unique X". That does not appear to be a standard notation, though, at least according to that wikipedia article. That's totally standard notation. "∃x" means "the...

Somewhat borderline whether this is a game question, but it didn't seem worth a new thread of its own. Who is the most powerful magic-user people can name from a source older than 1970? This can include gods, as long as they are "people" like the Greek or Norse gods and not just big beard...

For what it's worth, Crystal Chronicles is basically a setting designed to have adventuring parties of like 2-6 people running around and invading dungeons full of monsters that are just manifestations of evil energy and thus not sentient so it's okay to murder them as much as you want.

Okay first of all, that NineInchNall guy saying "Path fo Daggers" got the worst fan reaction surely has no idea what he is talking about. "Crossroads of Twilight" is by far the most hated book and quite possibly the worst fantasy novel of all time. It makes "Path of Daggers...

Not going to argue about whether Wheel of Time is a good series, because that's a stupid argument to have. I will say that the biggest complaint is that books 8 and 10 kind of fizzle at the end. What's actually going on there is that books 8-9 are really one novelistic arc and books 10-11 are really...

Honestly even as a fan of the series Wheel of Time is at minimum 4 books too long, and you could tell the same story in 10 or less books without losing anything. That I can agree with. I'd even go so far as to say you could get it all into 6 or 8. I don't think anyone has ever said Wheel of Time is...

Wasn't the endgame of WOT basically Rand and the Dark One creating universes at each other? Rand was pretty explicitly over the level cap; I was thinking more about the rest of the endgame, where you had the massive armies clashing with each other. Rand's battle with the Dark One is high-level, I s...

LOL! 5e's PHB has "Appendix E" which is like the old Appendix N. For inspirational reading. Okay, that's a nice idea. BUT WTF IS THIS...? Robert Jordan? "Eye of teh World" and the rest of the Wheel of Time series? Oh yeah, how inspiring. I've always wanted to play an RPG where n...

Prak: Right. And that should be higher in Asia because lots of things happen and you haven't heard about most of them. When things happen in New York, you probably hear about them, because the media is all there. So maybe 10 things happen and you hear about 8 of them. That gives you a low ratio of 5...

Frank: in the Asia section you wrote "The ratio of “things that happen” to “things that happen that you've heard about” is probably lower for Asia than it is for anywhere else on Earth." I'm pretty sure you have this backwards, since right now it says that you hear about almost everything ...

Nobody is satisfied with their current rules, so they buy the next edition, hoping it'll make the setting they love more playable. But, but, but, but...SR4 is better than SR5. No one should buy SR5. SR5 is fucking terrible. It's like being unsatisfied with your penis because it's kind of smallish, ...

I'm hung up on the phrasing "Drawback: The character must identify as female." I know what they meant, but...

Not that this matters, but this is all an aside anyway. But even if there were an attested Latin plural of "virus" it would almost certainly be either "viri" or "vira" and not "virii". The word breaks most of the usual rules for Latin nouns but there's no way...

It is difficult to explain how pretentious Unknown Armies actually is. I think the perfect encapsulation is the fact that it describes demons as being “the supernatural equivalent of ebola virii: you have to know what you're doing to handle them, and even then you can die horribly.” Not just that t...

You guys might find this interesting. It's an attempt at tablet-enabled table-top roleplaying, and seems pretty cool. (Disclosure: I know one of the guys working on it). Also has Robin Laws involved, for what that's worth.

Frank: I guess my question would be, why doesn't an Ioun Stone give you extra spells per day, then? The prestige classes that give "+ 1 level in a spellcasting class" advance your spells per day, but the +caster level items don't. (I'm not saying you're wrong, per se. Just that it seems li...

As for Frank's argument, if I were the king of D&D and during the design process someone came to me and said they wanted to define the term "levels in a spellcasting class " as referring to "caster levels" rather than " class levels", I would tell them they were an...

If the rulebook says I can't swing from the chandelier, I get annoyed at the rulebook and stay friends with the DM. But, importantly, that really only works well if the group has a policy of following the stated rules--otherwise I read the rule, ask the DM to change it, and if he doesn't he's still...

However. Most people aren't malicious assholes with a raging hateboner for their players. But that doesn't stop them from sometimes, you know, being dicks. Generally without really thinking about it. A detailed ruleset won't stop anyone from being a dick deliberately. But it can stop you from being...

You know, I think I just figured something out. And the answer is the Fundamental Attribution Error. For those who aren't familiar (and you should be--it's kind of important), the FAE describes our tendency to believe that other people's behavior is because "that's the sort of person they are,&...

what is it with the denners and beating their heads against language? Autism. Fairly mild. It's pretty common among smart people. And nerds. And smart nerds. (And yes, autism spectrum tendencies make it more so). But most people have this sort of not-necessarily-explicit belief that words have obje...