The Gaming Den

As a minor note, especially re: mechanics, my understanding is that you can incorporate works from the public domain into a private thing. You can't claim ownership of the public domain pieces, but you can't claim much ownership regarding dice mechanics anyways. I totally understand the desire to re...

This still has not received much attention or love. Understandable. aWoD started up. However, I really liked this idea, and while I am mainlining other projects now, I thought this should be revisited. The most apparent missing element in this game design is a resolution mechanic. Using Roll and Kee...

Because a merry band of adventurers seriously amounts to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table going to beat someone's head in, and so depending on the opposition, such as an ogre, a villainous knight, a faerie warrior, it does in many ways resemble an ancient aristocratic war party. So whi...

You can have people start each encounter at something approximate to full health, though, and still operate under those assumptions, as long as they expended resources to return to full health that matter. Such as, yes, healing surges, or healing counters (which I think I like more). Fraaaaank, your...

I will admit that there are some concepts that are very close to each other in concept, and thus should be combined. However, just because a concept has lots of things close to it doesn't mean it should get to do everything in a class-based game. Especially because the bard needs to specialize in so...

*looks at personal game design notes*

Dammit, Frank, stop copying meeeeeeee!!!

*cough* Sorry.

Characters should totally have ability paths that take them down different variations on their class, because otherwise no one will really want to play the same class twice if they get a good campaign with the first one going, or at least no one who likes variety. However, in spite of this fact, it'...

Frank, would placing these different races in a setting that is earth , geographically, work? Geographically? Maybe. It's pretty common for legends to pile onto legends and soon a place is teeming with demons if you assume all the legends are true and refer to different things. They'd probably fit ...

Mouse Worlds almost certainly use levels of a sort, in terms of Size.

However, the bonus growth for having a better Size than someone.should be so ridiculous it might as well be a +100 or x100 modifier when dealing with things that are, well, 100 times your Size.

True. But wouldn't it be better to sit down, look at your material, and write a High Level Adventures book? Except not a Joke Book. A given MM is far more likely to have a well-populated lower level area, so it would seem more to the point to specifically redress that.

So, I realize Fantasy RPGs often have a monster manual. But fantasy RPG worlds can be big, as the Kitchen Sink Roleplaying thread observes. Vast, even. And while I can kind of see the point of publishing an iniital set of monsters to fill out the setting with, things you would commonly encounter pre...

I dislike the things it does to stories, rather than combat. I prefer solutions in terms of fixing death that instead avert, sidetrack, and outwit death, letting people effectively buy second chances in combat against fatal situations, and retreat (with the consequent admission of failure and loss)....

You have to ask yourself a question. If you make an Intelligence stat, then people can be rewarded for not putting points into it. Likewise with Charisma. Are there any main characters that should not be intelligent or charismatic, and are still actually main characters, and not someone's lower-leve...

I bow to the superior pedantry in this thread.

Digestion is the process of extracting nutrients and energy from food.

So yes, you misused it.

We pass a ton of shit through our digestive system that cannot be processed and thus is just thrown away. It doesn't harm us most of the time. And yes, in this case shit is quite literal.

I think that is why Frank admitted Undead run off, essentially, a black box. Just, people don't usually think of dwarves and such as running off black boxes. Dragons, maybe.

A thought was panning through my head, and I thought I'd put it out here since there's enough numbers-analysis nerds here for it to be picked over to some satisfaction. If you wanted a fairly heroic setting, would it be appropriate to let people just straight up have automatic hits on tasks, based o...

Making humans ostensibly "friendly" to a minotaur doesn't mean removing the context of them being a minotaur. Unless you believe the only interesting relationship is outright violence, in which case your idea of a D&D game is even shallower than that.

I kind of have my own ideas but I'd like to see that at least. Just telling me where it was would be good enough. Dragon had some gems.

I meant pretty much what I just said. Drawing on correspondences to allow more than a couple of effects to be grouped under an element's banner. Fire grows to include "fiery" personalities as well, and as such rage, et cetera.

I think a presupposition on one side that is not shared by the other, in this argument, is that the farmer has read the Monster Manual, and thus knows that all the evil humanoids are well, evil, and the good humanoids are good. The problem with this assumption that the "farmer is ignorant"...

I would figure the humans actually have bought into a protection racket from the Ancient Elven Civilization a few doors over, and so there's a general unwillingness to unnecessarily antagonize them. Low-level raiding goes on, though, because Not-Elrond can't be bothered dispatching his heralds just ...

Keep in mind that almost all recharges that work off a time period or event the character experiences in-game, are in reality exchanging resources for another resource. Sometimes they are exchanging time for the power. Sometimes they are exchanging an opportunity cost for the power. But when it boil...

Elements are easier to use if you use them in a mythical way, or use exotic elements. The basic Western four tend to lead to people introducing Akasha again and just lumping everything interesting into the Quintessence, as a result. While a space for inarticulate damage types is sometimes good... If...

How many elemental colors should there be, really? You obviously gotta put your foot down somewhere. I've heard prime number values thrown around a lot, but is there any particular reason they have to be uneven? If you have a "basic elements" system, what kind of damage should disintegrati...