The Gaming Den

I would also recommend looking to see if they offer (Introduction to) Logic as part of their math courses. They might categorize it as a philosophy course or something, but check to see if you can meet the Math requirement with it. Then take it. It is not a "game design math" class per se,...

If you reduce the number of qualities that a person has to pick out RIGHT NOW in order to establish their character to a number that you can count off your hands, you reduce drastically the amount of chargen time. For instance, the best example would be between 3e and 4e. I will not champion 4e as a...

White Wolf at least admits it makes terribly balanced games, justifying it simply by saying it is not interested in making balanced games... that is, that those are basically for chumps. So they do manage to pan out interesting hooks and concepts, but not so much on the mechanical rigor, and that's ...

Japan has lousy armor making techniques besides compared to Europe.

I was only thinking combining weapons to make super guns or combining construct companions to make megazords. If that's dumb though, yeah, I can figure. Anything you WOULD add? It'd be way more awesome if being Red Ranger meant that you can toss out team colors to the rest of your allies, with no e...

It has a lot to do with the old "write what you know" adage, however. If you don't understand combat on even the most basic level of experience, it will be hard to model even a fictional version of that using a system. You can do it, but it means you have to find some other jumping off poi...

Still not that, ever, or it creates the Favored (Blah) Bonus balance problem.

I don't think referring to the universe (or the world) as a creation, in and of itself, is a bad thing, unless you believe that the universe had no definite beginning, i.e. that the Big Bang did not happen. We don't really have a problem with saying even inanimate objects can create certain things, ...

It is actually pretty well-known that cielingcat's claim regarding doing nothing is not actually that outlandish, although it is a false absolute. To be precise, as time goes by, people who experience gender dysphoria generally feel worse and worse, resulting in a mounting desire to transition. This...

The problem is that I already used the stats written in the adventure against the party, and it would be 'slightly' noticeable when they got their rematch against the same vampires and didn't have to face shapeshifting, swarm-summoning, dominating, fast-healing, and damage reduction. So, a vampire ...

Laurell K. Hamilton writes two series, from my understanding, Merry Gentry and Anita Blake. They're both basically the same thing (girl surrounded by harem of men she fucks, gets powerups from sex, no seriously). But one doesn't really involve vampires at all since it's about a faerie princess (who ...

Best way to limit the skill challenge system meaningfully seems to be to make a limit of a certain number of "rounds" to screw around. Whether those rounds represent numbers of hours or even days, or are a couple of minutes or even seconds apiece.

It seems the most sensible kind of floating rock has an inherent tendency to push away from the earth which increases on either a geometric or exponential principle the more of it you get together (and thus cause their repulsion fields to overlap and combine, the bottom of which presumably touches s...

SR4 Spirits are too powerful. There will be a series of limits put on them. I would be fairly surprised if they don't have their skills cut in half. I would also expect them to have their mental stats decoupled from Force, for fairly obvious reasons. What other limits would you suggest being placed...

This is a kind of non-question. You haven't set your design goals. Do you want to make all the races balanced with each other, or do you want to make them balanced with the original 3e races? It's not hard to rewrite all the 3e races you want to use to have more interesting stuff in them. What do yo...

What if portals aren't two-ways? You can have a controlled portal in, but you might need to find a new one to get out, because the river only flows in one direction.

A question: a lot of games use a "driving interest" line instead of an alignment system or a "how you act" system, sometimes with a context supplied for it (such as an emotion, such as "Kill all orcs / Hatred"). Is that a useful prompt? Why, why not?

Why do you want to do this? There's nothing inherently wrong with having "weird time" planes, but you have to specify a reason. If it's consistent, it's usable, and will be manipulated as a resource. However, you could easily, if you simply want the ability to motivate stories, make it inc...

This post bugs me because you get all your history wrong. Alignments were not made by WotC, and originally the only alignments were Law and Chaos, with Law being more Good and Chaos being more Evil in a general sense. Good and Evil were only imported, and naturally they confuse the system, because L...

He looks more like he's a Construct as equally well-built as Punch and Judy. But he could just be a badass normal. In comics, Luthor is allowed to take a full-on punch from Superman, go flying back, stand up, grin, and say "You can hit!" As opposed to, you know, disintegrating into monatom...

Any number of dice that you can fit in the palm of your hand and roll easily, be it 1 or 5, is not a problem. So there's no real significant difference in terms of encumbrance between 1d20 and 3d6. There is between pretty much anything else and 20d4. Myself, I prefer 2d10, if only because the curve ...

The upshot of all this is a system where people don't like taking on too many opponents at once (Chi Aura and kung fu techniques start running out), where people are encouraged to diversify (to use several, not just one Chi type, and also have similar kung fu techniques available so they can always ...

Huh. I had thought that the point of all that chi accounting crap was to make it so that encounters could have lasting relevance without being deadly. If they don't actually do that, what is the point? -Username17 They're Magic colors, like he stated, but also NIN forgot the Jade healing limitation...

Weapons of the Gods in Brief (or not very) Weapons of the Gods is a high-action, high-fantasy epic wuxia RPG. It is very focused on wushu traditions, and is not attempting, in the slightest, to be anything like some of the more "realistic" wuxia scenarios. To put it briefly, a modern WotG...

Exalted needed more "campaign concept" books like Outcaste (1e). It's quite probable that the specifics of the things inside it were not very workable, but it worked out such that it provided multiple interesting stories you could run, new character archetypes you could play without introd...