The Gaming Den

I downloaded the demo and made a shocking discovery that will shake the Den to the core: Wizards rule, Fighters drool. Seriously though, what were they thinking with Corentin? Technically he's a water bender but he performs like a house of fire. He has at-will choke point control that doubles as an ...

I like the octopath look

3. They never tell you that the setting is meant to be modular. By 2004 the World of Darkness had a huge fan base that was invested in more than a decade of continuity. People loved Vampire: The Masquerade. They still do. And nwod just refused to acknowledge the existence of anything owod related f...

From my North American perspective I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it just comes down to Scottish and Irish being some of the most exotic and easily identifiable accents a non-American can have while still hailing from primarily English speaking countries. E.g., I sometimes have a surprisingly h...

No amount of rules text will ever be able to reach out of the book and slap someone who's determined to be a bad GM, but good rules can still benefit someone who's trying to be a good GM but has no idea what they're doing. This. I remember being 12 and thinking that D&D was just going to work o...

I missed the electrical stories the first time around but I'm not missing a chance to commiserate. On the bright side, my step dad was am electrician and a proud man just in general so I grw up in a house that was buttoned down rather nicely. On the downside, my basic working knowledge of terms mean...

Yeah, I don't really get that take. I kinda hated the Raimi spiderman movies because I felt like the tone was too schizophrenic and they bet too heavily on me caring about Peter Parker's well-being. I was just there for popcorn and a couple quips, not moping.

I honestly had no clue Frank left until it was mentioned in this thread. And honestly, good goddamned riddance. There's some real "pot, kettle" bullshit in his departure announcement. I mean, is there really? The last time I remember Frank basically calling someone a rape apologist it was...

I wonder if vehicular-based action is a real barrier to space sci-fi. Space opera, notably, essentially demands starship combat in at least some measure, and that sort of thing is expensive to setup and put together. It mostly definitely is. Frankly, one of the issues with naval shows w/vaguely rec...

We shouldn't be surprised that success is rare if your criteria is narrow enough that we have to throw out Thor: Ragnarok & Guardians and are specifically looking for films that can be iterated on top of that. Part of the issue here is that the visual standard for sci-fi theater releases has bee...

Lots of series have trouble moving on from their existing leads - we as audiences have a lot invested in certain characters and we want more of them, even when it doesn't make sense. Even Doyle didn't bring back Moriarty. This isn't actually as an insurmountable problem as you're making it out to b...

Also, the soundtrack is killer. You can demonstrably get pretty far by nailling some aesthetic details and heavily featuring one guy who was just obviously meant to be a movie star.

Well, that's a shame and you should follow more fantasy art blogs. I understood Prak's post as an attempt to properly frame Lizbeth Eden's internet stature rather than a comment on Julie Belle's celebrity. After all, google says that this removal is already one of the most famous things about Lizbe...

I think making a strong claim like 'objectice morality' doesn't exist is difficult and requires a very high bar of evidence -- like thousands of years of human society living in such a society. No u I mean that unironically. Seriously, if you're going to pull the "extraordinary claims require ...

Rule of thumb is that if it sounds useful the Rocker probably can't do it with any methods unique to their idiom. My favorite thing about Rockers is that they had a complicated and swingy songwriting mechanic which meant that the average successful band tops out at one good album then proceeds to di...

actually, wait, i left out the possibility of him pleading down to piddly bullshit and then trump fucking pardons that because he is basically the world's longest shit stain.

Yeah, to my mind the fact that you rarely see cops charged with so much as manslaughter tells me about everything I need to know about the odds of an upgrade happening. There's actually hypothetical just worlds where I can imagine being cool with 3rd degree murder and a full 25 in the pokey being th...

Personally I've never understood why people are so attached to dumb directionless decks midrange decks. If interacting with people is that important play a control deck. Far as I'm concerned if decks need a clear synergistic gameplan to succeed that's good design. From your prior MTG posts I get th...

Yeah, I've made the comparison to Dwarf Fortress before since that game is one of the finest examples of the way people can mind caulk their way to a story even when all they are given is ascii art and insanity. I mean, yeah, a scenario where the invading elephants get past the battlements because a...

Sadly it'll take far longer than that before I'll have a real degree of confidence. One of the things that sometimes gets lost in the talk about flattening local curves is the notion that locking things down helps slow the spread to other communities. Basically, a lot of these protesting assholes in...

as a minnesotan I now feel compelled to bring up the superiority of duck duck grey duck over duck duck goose.

The DM roleplays all the NPCs and monsters in the game, and some of those NPCs and monsters will want to try to kill your characters. True, but even in the bad old days Gary & Dave explicitly referred to the DM's role as that of "campaign referee" and NPCs aren't supposed to be metaga...

Good rules are rules that help create the stories the players expect to play in the game. I actually feel like this is where story RPGs have gone wrong and become too deterministic. Without fail all of my most cherished gaming moments come from situations where everyone ceded enough agency to each ...

Linda is a perfect comedy name. 2 syllables, and the second one is "duh." Half my enjoyment of Bob's Burgers just comes from H. Jon Benjamin saying Linda while exasperated.

We need to figure out how Finland and Germany fit into this unified theory of People Who Suck before I'm willing to sign off on it.