The Gaming Den

We're all supposed to work from home but my current (temporary) home is an unheated room with a mattress on the floor and no internet connection (necessary for my work). So for now I work alone in the office (which is walking distance from the appartment) but there are rumors that we'll be forced to...

For my Shadowrun rules, skill checks are exactly that: you check if your skill is higher than the difficulty of the task. If it is, you succeed. If it's not, you have a few options: - Do not attempt it - Take your time (+1 to your skill) - Go for a less-optimal outcome (-1 to the difficulty): you ca...

As Thaluikhain wrote, the problem of the Finesse/Power separation is that having a "small candle flame" inside someone's heart is much more efficient than hitting him with a "campfire". That might be what you want, but it means that people who hurl fireballs are either people who...

Because the next update will have rotating tubes so that they can call it a laser gatling.

fucking IPA's... I used to love craft beers until they all got together and decided EVERY FUCKING BEER NEEDS TO BE AN IPA NOW. I completely agree. And on the "distressed" topic, I hate that "default" interior design trend. The kind of stuff that started in AirBnb/Starbucks/home ...

In my Shadowrun system, the characters have one condition monitor (similar to the one in Shadowrun rules, with 8+Body/2 boxes). The armor has its own condition monitor that's drawn above the one of the character. When a character is hit, the player marks one box per damage point (with a small tick, ...

You could also do it in two tiers. First half of the campaign, they play mid-tier investigators who hunt down the cultist who want to revive Dracula. The game is more focused on investigation, they only fight low level monsters and would rather avoid other monsters. However, they get some loot and e...

My dice pool estimations are often aligned with the archetypes. It's my PC's optimized characters who are often far above them. I don't expect corporate strike teams to all have the optimized combination of qualities/cyberware/adept powers/sustained spells that gave the PC their stratospheric dice p...

For Shadowrun I used to use quick dice pool estimations.
I generally kept the NPC below the level of PC, except for exceptional NPCs.

That's why I like to use mechanisms to abstract the planning. Giving them planning points they can spend to avoid problems works pretty well.

Edge is problematic because its refresh mechanism is unclear and because its impact vary wildly depending on how many important dice rolls you have in your game. If you only have three important dice rolls in your game, you can edge them all and be guaranteed to succeed. If you have hundred of them ...

A good way to have "scientifically grounded" super powers is to consider that the human body has an enormous raw power but it often limits itself to avoid damage and/or an overconsumption of resources. When you see videos of people getting thrown across the room when getting electrocuted, ...

I remember reading the Thrawn trilogy and reading many references to how the "clone war" was that horrible thing and that hopefully all the technology was lost. And I imagined it as a sort of galaxy-shaking event with two opposing clone armies with theoretically infinite soldiers that were...

I remember a story about a true neutral village, I think it was in Neverwinter Nights but I might be mistaken. Anyway, it was a village where people considered that you had to stay firmly in the middle, so when you did a good deed you had to do a bad one to keep the equilibrium: "I've baked som...

I'd expect the City officials to see that letter as a plot from the PC to choose the judge. They could: - Just inform them that the judge has to be appointed by Heavens and that the proper process will be followed. If they don't care about the PC they could pretend they consider that the PC are barb...

I think the last Blizzard game I enjoyed was Black Throne, and it wasn't that great. Rock'n'Roll racing was cool, though it had some pretty absurd design choices like the campaign tracks not being available in the non-campaign mode.

I've got a few for Shadowrun (SR4A mostly) The 300km/h centaur It was an experiment to create the fastest running character at chargen. Started with a Centaur and had him SURGEd (there's a text somewhere that says that it's rare but possible) so that he could have Centaur Legs (I'm aware it makes no...

FrankTrollman wrote: In any case, I find the idea of kings voluntarily abdicating in favor of democracy just because they think democratic philosophy is awesome to be completely out to lunch. That has never happened and will never happen.

I might be mistaken but I think it was the case in Bhutan,

Thanks for the inputs. I'd like to make it clear that for now nothing is set in stone, what I posted were just what came to mind after giving it some thought but I'm really open to changes. I don't really mind if the collection part takes time, since the "elimination" part will be solved q...

Due to my wife's passion for the 1st generation of pokémon games, I've got the Pokemon "Kanto Edition" of Monopoly in my game stash. It's the usual Monopoly game, with properties replaced with Pokémons arranged by gyms, train stations are pokeballs and utility companies are legendary pokém...

In my Mechs-vs-Kaiju game, the combat system add a layer of abstraction. All players do their actions and the opposition (which can be a single Kaiju or multiple monsters) does its attack roll. The result of the opposition is compared with the total result of the PCs and the winning side gets to cho...

I like that some people are trying to turn a Overwatch character into a symbol of the Hong-Kong protests to try to get China to ban Overwatch.

There's something cyberpunk about it, I wonder how long we'll have to wait until some company weaponizes this against one of its competitors.

What I like to do is to give the agency back to the players. Whenever there's a "success at cost" you give the option to the player to either: - Stop whatever he wanted to do - Choose a way to lower his aim - Possibly pay a cost (like stress points or something similar) For example, the sn...

I've recently heard about an interesting mechanic in a Space Opera game, it might have been "Metal Adventures" (a French space op game about heroic space pirates) but I'm not sure. Anyway, the idea was that you could give some of your "Fate" points (similar to the expandables Luc...

I've made a system for Shadowrun. The goal was to have rules that support the way I want to run the game. It cuts down on dice rolls, has one unified system for all non-combat aspects of the game (matrix, social, magic, driving, etc.). In general, the game considers that you're a professional, so yo...