The Gaming Den

Comparative Failure Coefficients: Apocalypse World vs. Masks. Summary: Masks characters roll with higher bonuses than Apocalypse World characters, and their moves give better and more consistent results in the 7-9 range. All of them can spend "Team" to retroactively improve a roll, many o...

In the thread about PbtA games in general, I mentioned that I think Masks: A New Generation, the teen superhero game, is substantially superior to other PbtA games, both in general and with regard to player agency specifically. Shinimasu asked what I liked about it and also posted a list of criticis...

The only part I omitted was "When you directly engage a threat, roll + Danger. On a hit, trade blows. On a 10+, pick two. On a 7-9, pick one." Which didn't seem vitally important to my point. Do you know what happens when I roll a 10 in almost every other PbtA hack's version of Directly E...

Shinimasu is basically correct about what the problems with Masks are. Masks was made by taking a generic PbtA engine and adding on 4 shiny new features -- "Abilities", "Label Shifts", "Team points" and "having something that kinda looks like a tactical combat mini...

So it sounds like they finally figured out that all three archetypes need to have a spell list they can learn a pile of different active abilities off of?

Super-ultimate thread necromancy ho! Your current write-up has carnivore asuras and vegetarian elves. This seems backwards. The Sidhe and the Vanir were famous hunters, illusion magic is great for hunting, and you've already specified that elves are psychologically adapted for solitude and self-reli...

Most of the backgrounds give you your choice of a cert or a piece of gear. But everyone ends up throwing away gear for lack of inventory space. So taking bonus gear is for suckers and everyone takes certs.

So there's a teen superheros game called Masks: A New Generation. It's officially part of the PBTA brand, but seems to have had substantially more and better design work put into it than any other apocalypse hack I've looked at. Playing Masks has actually really helped me get a better understanding ...

Are there any Denners in Virginia?

Another huge benefit of sticking with one advancement system is that it makes it easy to audit character sheets or reconstruct missing ones. A beautiful thing about D&D 3.5 is that if you houserule intelligence bonuses to grant retroactive skillpoints, I can look at at a character sheet for a hi...

But -- as I said in the other thread about this very issue -- there is no need to use incentives to try to push people toward generalization or specialization because as the designer you have it in your power to force people to be as generalized or specialized as you like. Even if you want people to...

Splitting up a group has always been a headache in RPGs; I don't know of a single group that doesn't try to avoid it like the plague. Is there a way to support that, though? Like... when the face is doing his thing, most of the other players are sitting there with little to add to the discussion an...

Linear chargen and geometric progession does one thing well, and that's encourage hyperspecilization at chargen followed by broadening during the campaign. But instead of incentivizing hyperspecialization at character generation with the promise of future advantages, you could just make it mandator...

Magic the Gathering has too many types of types and they don't make any sense. Combine that with their extreme reluctance to create analytical categories and the results are extremely frustrating. The fact that we've all gotten used to saying things like "instant or sorcery card," "no...

If you're going to combine instants and sorceries into one card type and use subtypes to specify timing, it is sorceries and not instants that should be marked as exceptional. Card Types Houses . Girls . 1-3 more types of permanents* Spells . Some are "Spell (Ritual)" and some are just &qu...

I remember the social currency thread. I remember being surprised that no one mentioned the most fundamental problem with his attempt to design a rule for "gratitude," which was that Zak appeared not to believe that gratitude is even a thing . Seriously, he proposed that if you do nice thi...

The primary function of the "races" chapter in a PHB is not to provide a satisfying account of the overall setting, but to help players develop concepts for PCs. To the extent that history is mentioned, the question is not how rich a narrative you get, but how it functions as an aid to cha...

If you take a Prestige Class that increases your initiator level for a Martial Adept Class, are you allowed to trade-up one of your known maneuvers like you would be able to had you gained an actual Martial Adept level? That's a really big deal, because after a few levels, more than half the maneuv...

I'm not sure why it would bother anyone that many or even most of the races would have a fallen empire in their history. Even in real earth history, fallen empires are a dime a dozen. Most of the well-known ethnic groups of the modern world do have fallen empires to pine for. I actually really enjoy...

poisons have a duration of one minute. The effects on round 0 and 10 are typically instantaneous, but the creature is considered "poisoned" for one minute. If not, Neutralize Poison does next to nothing. Remove disease "cures all diseases that the subject is suffering from." Rem...

Omegonthesane wrote:"a duration of one or more rounds" cannot reasonably be interpreted as "only durations that are literally measured in rounds" - clearly a duration of 24 hours is a duration that is longer than 1 round.

Okay. Diseases and poisons still don't have durations at all, in any units.

Diseases do not have durations! And certainly they don't have durations measured in rounds. Poisons do not have durations. Level drain does not have a duration.

Almost none of the people want to do with Iron Heart Surge actually work, because they nearly all run afoul of the explicit and *extremely* narrow restriction that it only ends a condition with "a duration of one or more rounds." This means that almost everything AncientHistory was talking...

I keep forgetting that we're only talking about Luminary-tier supernaturals here, which might generate a misleading picture. Many of the trash monsters are unrelated to this question, of course -- when considering how many bloodsuckers a city can support, we don't need to worry about how many zombie...

Indeed, in most settings I can think of, PCs are expected to fight more NPCs with weapons than NPCs with magic, and more monsters with physical attacks than monsters with energy attacks. It's quite likely to be good for balance to have some kind of weapon that attacks magic defense, whether you skin...