The Gaming Den

Is there any other war themed legacy game to look out for? I enjoyed the game of thrones boardgame and Axis & Allies, and figure something like that would be good for legacy. Nope Risk and Pandemic are the only two games using the Legacy mindset. I expect quite a few to come out this year thoug...

Are they as awesome as they sound (Vamp disciplines + Werewolf shapeshifting + gifts)? By revised Abominations weren't that hot. And were almost impossible to "make" against the werewolf's will. Frank's forgetting that by revised they included a rule where a werewolf could voluntarily spe...

But the problems of society and nightlife and the fact that there is no Masquerade aren't even discussed. Hell, DA:V20 doesn't even have a setting section. It has a section on Italy, it has a section on Middle East, but the game's primary setting of central Europe is not in the fucking corebook bec...

Galaxy truckers is a great game - and that designer does really good work. I really like Space Alert as well if you like coop games. Similar mechanics (you program orders while under time pressure with partial information), then you have a resolution phase where you see how badly the plan failed. I...

The only Zobmie Board game I've played that didn't suck is Last Night on Earth. Way better than Walking Dead, although I haven't played Dead Winter. Honestly though, just never buy a franchise tie in board game. There might be some that don't suck, but chances are really fucking slim. Franchise tie...

But some of these things are physical objects that cost quite a bit to fabricate. I'm not sure what the profit margin is on small runs of specialty dice or what print on demand costs are down to these days, but the overhead on a lot of that is shockingly large. Small runs of specialty dice generall...

I have the second one. It's a funky system and an okay looking kingdom simulator. I read through the D20 version and wish I hadn't. But both of those were published years before the HBO series came out and blew up. And neither of them particularly are especially conductive to political backstabbing....

Also, if you don't want to go full Game of Thrones backstabbing, there's still always the inter and intra-party bickering of The Walking Dead, and Survivor has been on for a bajillion seasons now. Politicking is culturally relevant. But I've found that it's a jarring tone shift for a lot of RPG play...

See ? That's the point - your groups explored those themes at their own will. A game that's good at genre-emulation do not rely on "good will" for focusing on its target genre(s). The fact the "katanas & trench-coats" playstyle is so popular around the net - with zero focus ...

Anyway, the entire magickal spheres crap is crap. No one can make sense out of any of that shit, the results are stupid and unbalanced and it doesn't do anything good. Far better to have the Mages in your setting use whatever system of magic your Vampire Tremere and Werewolf Shamans use. Less super...

Personally I think you could actually make better games by splitting them apart completely and making the worlds explicitly different That is explicitly where oWOD started. And it was such a good idea that it probably lasted all of 15 minutes before being thrown out and cluster-fucked into a big or...

I did a one-off cooked variant of Toon that took place in the Nightmare Before Christmas pantheon of holiday worlds.

It was goofy but fun.

Making this thread more useful, how does one avoid getting bored or "eyes glossed" when trying to read a given RPG book? I've had this issue when I go to a hobby shop and just read/skim whatever they have on shelf. I think part of it is lack of fancy art (much as I don't feel it should be...

Unfortunately, if Vampire is the flagship franchise the Technocracy should probably be eliminated entirely. Black-suited G-men who erase evidence of the supernatural, using what looks like high-tech gadgets, is something that should exist though -- it seems like it fits right in the with the "...

Here's another alternative that has sometimes worked for me in the past: state that weekly adventure prep is too much, and you can only run your game every other week. State that you'd still like to get together weekly and on alternate weeks either someone else can run something or you can break ou...

By the time I came along towards the end of 2nd, Vampires to Lawn Chairs was a way to piss the vampire people off. You'd drop it and suddenly 20 people from the Vampire forum who never commented in Mage would show up bitching and whining and freaking out. It also was kind of a joke about how loose t...

For my top 3 "in general," I would probably pick HERO for a lesson in effect-based generation, Vampire the Masquerade because of my latent goth tendencies, and... Descent. Yes, the board game. It is up to the aspiring developer to decide whether the last is a lesson in "what you coul...

Frank pretty much nailed it. GURPS might be a mildly controversial submission but I understand why he put it in there. I honestly don't know what I'd put in it's place.

So there's no real shortage of potential enemies if your big over arcing plot is "The World Is Ending Because The Universal Force of Destruction Has Gone Bonkers." Pretty much each splat can have their Doomsday Cult faction, mostly people who think the end of modern society is the tits be...

There's no panacea to the "run a game every week" fatigue. Seriously, do something else with your time - videogames, boardgames, Test Cricket, whatever. It'll do wonders. Yeah. Board games might not be a bad idea. If you're competition adverse there's lots of co-op games out there. The Le...

Which - cutting back world-spanning plots and concentrating on "personal drama" - notably was what they already strived for in VtM Revised, as written many times by Justin Achilli himself, but couldn't accomplish due to the existing oWoD baggage. Your argument is exploded on the platform ...

Incidentally, the OP announcement was one of the most poorly worded articles I've ever read. I read it three times and had to check out the notes Heaven's Thunder Hammer posted to make sure I was reading it correctly. If that's who is going to be fishing for COD then yeah. That bodes horribly. I lo...

I won't go back to using official storylines because I stopped using them far before the Time of Judgment. They don't really care if you use official storylines. You're a home tabletop player. They wouldn't even mind if you kitbashed your home table some weird homebrew thing out of CoD crap. They a...

Incidentally, the OP announcement was one of the most poorly worded articles I've ever read. I read it three times and had to check out the notes Heaven's Thunder Hammer posted to make sure I was reading it correctly. If that's who is going to be fishing for COD then yeah. That bodes horribly. I lov...

I think the solution is to handle feats exactly the way Wizards handle spells. You can only "equip" (actualize, incorporate, whatever) 2 fighter abilities of your highest level plus however many of lower levels, but you can go on training journeys and write as many feats as you want on yo...