The Gaming Den

Quite frankly I can't even think of an RPG other than Ars Magica that at least tries to do something with the existence of society. Well, quite trivially you have games like Vampire and Shadowrun, and even back in the 70s you had games like Traveler and Call of Cthulhu. The general consensus of gam...

Very often, European fantasy is basically Viking raids versus villages that have no particular access to a larger society. And when Euro-fantasy gets more advanced socially , it also progresses militarily into being pirates firing cannons at each other. Orientalist Fantasy can smoothly deliver &quo...

I don't think Cyberpunk is or ever was about nihilism. Much like with Lovecraft, that's a severe flanderisation. The Sprawl Trilogy and Snow Crash, being the biggest examples of the genre, all end with happy endings and/or hope for the change. And for the record, here's Gibson talking about Neuroman...

The idea of "coding" is iffy as hell and often comes as reverse stereotyping. A prime example is Cora Harper from Mass Effect: Andromeda, who people complained was "queercoded" and "queerbaited" because she's a strong independent woman with short hair, and having those ...

Is your game a good faith effort to try and represent oft overlooked mythologies and trope specific to this culture? Then hire a couple sensitivity readers and maybe hone in on one culture in specific. Not necessarily that simple. Everyone hates "Memoirs of Geisha", but "The Last Sam...

It's the kind of thing that's hard to understand until you've lived somewhere you're the minority. I think a lot of people can relate to this. It's not just an ethnic minority thing - you can look at things like "gentrification" of nerd hobbies like comic books and video games* My main is...

Doesn't the saying goes that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery? Besides it's one of the oldest habits of humankind. Cultures copy cool stuff from each other when they meet and we all profit from it. Like Anime started by imitating western cartoons and ended up becoming its own great thing...

Not using the word "tengu" doesn't mean that you can't steal liberally from the stories and culture that inspired it, but it does cleanse your inevitable hamfisted take on that culture. Not shure about that, if you use Tengu and others known terms you get name recognition, which might hel...

If we want to nitpick, then blood and soil has already happened in Shadowrun and won. It was called NAN and it was called Tir nA nOg.

Maybe this is the Tolkien influence, but I'd like to see a lexicon of 300 common words. If it ends up being dumb, people won't use it, but it can make things appear 'fantastic'. That's what Planescape did, berk. Planescape just used obscure British slang like "berk". And it wasn't success...

If SR6's setting doesn't have the resurgence of Blood-and-Soil fascism (as opposed to Singaporean-style fascism) rocking the foundations of the corporatist status quo then I don't even think it's worth discussing. I don't think this narrative would make much sense without rewriting large chunks of ...

L5R authors didn't go out of their way to disparage the Burakumin (aside from a tidbit that a Burakumin can only reincarnate into a Burakumin), and you can justify their inclusion. As a samurai interacting with Burakumin is a social equivalent of juggling turds at the dinner table so you just never ...

So how did it all fall apart? -Username17 I'm going to posit that L5R did not fall apart, but was rotten the day it was written. And it was written by John Wick. John Wick is famous for player disempowering and love of "tragedy" where "tragedy" means rocks fall and player loses....

It is a little weird that captain America has a relationship with a woman who'd otherwise have met someone else and had kids with them, though. I'm assuming those kids just vanished after being unsnapped... Captain America's creepy incestuous time traveling relationship is probably the weirdest thi...

There's a variety of oriental fantasy genres, and a lot of them are a good fit for roleplaying. The most D&D you can get is classic chinese Xianxia. The genre experienced a resurgence recently with many popular web novels coming out, such as Warlock of the Magus World and I Shall Seal the Heaven...

Here's how bad it got:

https://community.fantasyflightgames.co ... ne-daimyo/

5e restarted the setting, but I've never been much of an L5R scholar so I can't tell you what they changed and what they left behind. The big issue is still that Rokugan is lacking the key elements that make the Sengoku Era so compelling. Sengoku Japan is split into a shitton of tiny clans bound by ...

You're playing a Thinblood with special "Thinblood powers". Uhh... V5 Thinbloods have special Thinblood powers in form of Thinblood Alchemy. Thinblood Alchemy is the ability to make blood magic potions that either mimic normal vampire disciplines, or do random bullshit ranging from teleki...

I've been reading L5R 5e lately, and I think it's an interesting case of a game that has been successfully modernized while also being really bad due to carried over baggage. Modernization: L5R 5e has five stats (rings): Fire, Water, Earth, Air and Void. In 4e- these rings were a compilation stat of...

I'm trying to think of a virtue that is explicity bad for a PC...? I think Frank's wrong about Enduring Magic - it's situationally useful. That said, Mercurian Magic is only ever good if you have access to an entire mercurian cabal, in which case you skullfuck the setting with big rituals. The rest...

Rodolf Kazmer wrote:

Guy sure has a speech pattern.

Maj, I barely know you and I don't think we've ever talked here, but I sincerely hope things improve for you and your son. I'm sorry for your loss.

How about monks?

I'm also a pariah because I prefer the Hobbit trilogy to the LotR trilogy. I like shiny action. I only said that the new trilogy was better than the original in my personal opinion. It's been decades since I watched the Hobbit, but the live action trilogy was a road trip movie that lasted over 11 h...

Rubick wrote:I play both the 5e RPG and LCG, AMA

How does the bushi/monk/shugenja/courtier balance shake out in play? It seems to me like everyone still dunks on courtiers, and Shugenja mostly still dunk on bushi.