The Gaming Den

Real time videogames are not like open-ended pen and paper games.

K wrote: I mean, there is no way to not reward system mastery.

Yeah, the idea that you would need to design for that is nuts.

I want my pen and paper RPGs to give me something that videogames don't. 4e was like a watered down miniatures game that you could add roleplaying onto. The game should be about collective creativity. Trying to ape MMOs or whatever isn't bad because it's "unoriginal." it's bad because they...

Point buy is another problem that can be solved, but is easier to ignore. Make the costs flat, but randomise a minimum score for each stat, tada (also, give the MAD classes some class stat bonuses, poor things). Now, if you want to buy 22 Str, it has to cost something, either by eating up your poin...

I have a T-shirt that says "WW(batman symbol)D"

Normal movement is not a metagame concept. Yeah it is. It's the kind of thing where you yourself have stated you have to go to FAQs to figure out what it means when you jump in a lake. You're pretty good at pointing out the flaws in your own arguments, heh. If you asked a character if he was able t...

Yeah. It's worth noting that the argument in favor male/female adjustments uses pretty much the exact same "logic" as the argument for orcs having nonsense adjustments. No they don't. I actually went (many years ago) and did the math. A proper male/female adjustment for a given adventurer...

Wow, that's a lot of interesting stuff... I wish this made it into the actual rules. Well it did make it, in scattered bits and pieces, into the 3.5e rulebooks (Haven't read the 4e ones). It just wasn't as clear as it could be because of the influence of some of the other writers. For example, Eber...

That's a perfect example of association; the mechanics are the fluff. Ignoring the bit where you kinda missed the point, by your reasoning quoted above, the solution to dissociated mechanics is to not write any fluff at all, because a mechanic is only dissociated if it contradicts existing flavor t...

a)Even with race powers, at the minimal attempt to make said race powers different, someone will number crunch the best race per class. Not if you make different races good in the same class in meaningfully different ways. Also, "it won't ever be perfect so we shouldn't try to improve things&q...

As a fan of Eberron, I remember playing the trial for DDO and thinking it did not really represent the setting well (and just was a bore in general, so I didn't go past the free trial). Don't be so quick to yell about the setting designer... a good deal of his stuff got reinterpreted by other write...

About ten years ago, someone wrote to Dragon to bash 3rd edition: "Bawwww why equal stats for male and female characters? That's unrealistic! That means you force me to have every other orc chief in my campaign to be female! Who gave you the right to say what goes in my campaign bawwww!" ...

Freedom of Movement Fluff: The character slips through restraints (including grasping limbs) as though they weren't there No, it slips through SOME restraints, and doesn't do anything at all to many others. water parts for them like air No it doesn't, because then they would fall to the sea floor. ...

No one has to actually get laid during the hobby. You just have to convince people it can happen, and people will convince themselves they bought it because of how awesome model railroading is after they by it to get laid but don't. Hurray for the human psychological tendency towards retroactive ov...

I think Skyrim is 40 dollars (not 60) today on the Steam holiday sale and you should BUY IT not pirate it.

The 4e thread got me thinking of dissociated mechanics in 3e that bugged me a little. Three off the top of my head.. 1 Evasion 2 5-foot steps (regardless of size) 3 The prohibition on two creatures in the same square Never thought there were a lot. Can anyone think of more? Were they ever a problem...

I'm surprised no one has given shout outs to the Final Fantasy method of everyone having subclasses: limited selections that can and must come from different lists. Like AD&D Dual Classing, the actual implementation requires way too much grinding to be acceptable in a table top format, but the ...

Gx1080 wrote:Not talking about religion (real religion, not fictional) or politics on a game is just good manners. Same as doing it on a job.

And you're equating that with playing a character who's not religious. What.

FWIW, I don't like the people who feel the need to play atheists on D&D because they tend to be wankers. @Prak_Anima There's no difference to me between the guy who brings atheism to a D&D game and the guy who brings religion or politics to it. They are all wankers. Wait. You have a problem...

I'm trying DDO out again, and, well, the setting is as shitty as I remember it. It's this generic, fantasy with english accents thing. Eberron has fucking airships powered by bound elementals, fantasy robots as a player race, and scorpion driders. How the fuck do you make that setting boring? If th...

The D&D method of racial stat adjustments is detrimental to both mechanics and story. The divide is because some people don't understand the implications of game mechanics, and are suspicious of people who do. So today I got into an argument with a friend. It was about whether or not racial pena...

(I can't be arsed to go back and see what was said in the past.) Well, I can remember what he said, so... :-\ He's saying that he went on the board, saw his essays, and they were not attributed. And that's a false statement too. Regardless of how you choose to interpret him, he's still not telling ...

Is this guy for real? 1) The original claim, from Frank's "whistleblower" that he unquestioningly believed, then refused to back down when it turned out that Ubernoob was lying because Frank never admits being wrong: Back while I was on the project I noticed a few of Frank's essays from th...

2) You are retarded. You just spent every fucking paragraph of that post claiming Frank accused you of taking credit for his work, even though he never fucking did that. Somebody has a short memory. His is/was an attempt to make a fully formed D&D game that would be an alternate 4th edition tha...

So, why is it so hard for Frank to merely just point out evidence to prove himself right/wrong, and Caedrus right/wrong? As it seems to me, Frank is just saying he refuses to provide evidence because: " I'm always right, and have people to back me up all religiously like, regardless if they un...