The Gaming Den

I think it's a bit bullshit. As you wrote, most people play RPG to have fun telling stories together. That's actually what set tabletop RPG apart from other games. There are board games where you go into dungeons to kill monsters and loot treasures, but if you decide to do this in a RPG rather than ...

Conscience is terribly slow, most of the time it just takes a backseat and then takes credit for whatever happened.

So training to shoot as a reflex is clearly a way to bypass conscience.

However you still have to deal with the PTSD if the person wasn't on board with the idea of killing people.

I have a similar approach of "power vs risks" for my Mech vs Kaiju game, where physics-defying Kaijus exist because there's a "mythical" plane parallel to ours, where (to put it shortly) the rule of cool apply instead of the rule of physics. The PC can also use the rules of the m...

My Swedish friends had this joke about how Swedes already did social distancing in normal times. It's not so funny today.

I liked the approach in the Chroma Squad video game: being transformed is better, but since it comes with a complete healing, it's better to wait until you've got low HP before transforming.

Last time I DMed a magical girl game, transformation was handled by "players do the transformation choreography while other players throw giltter". It was fun.

If you play "D&D: armed western intervention army in the Middle East", after destroying the Shadow King you just loot his treasury, cut a deal with the blacksmith to get his best stuff, and just leave the rest of the people deal with the Lizard Queen.

Pathologic isn't cyberpunk nor space opera and not exactly fantasy either.
But the first one was definitely a flawed masterpiece (I haven't played Pathologic 2 yet)

I haven't played Stellaris, but CK2 is much funnier as a "grand RPG" than a "grand strategy game". Strategy in CK2 is very limited and the best efforts that have been put to challenge players is basically magic fuck you armies that you can still beat easily by abusing the AI. You...

I'm not completely sure why that is. My best guess is that it's just a lazy cheat. That big pieces of the current and future demographics could simply be fudged away with 'I guess the pandemic changed those numbers.' These settings also often have wars, natural disasters, worldwide computer crashes...

A big problem I have with the general Insanity mechanisms or even the basic concept of Insanity as handled in many Mythos works is that it's not how things work. Generally, people say that what drive people insane when confronted with the Mythos is that they discover that all they believed about the...

Not so shure about Japan, I got the impression they are trying the (early) Trump method of not testing? So the numbers are low. But the curve seems to be going straight up. Please correct me, if I am mistaken. That's what I read about Japan too. For S. Korea, I've read that they did a lot of testin...

There are all kinds of EMP. There are small disturbances that will just cause your phone to lose reception, or you screen to flicker and there are major EMP that will fry your electronics and possibly your body. Similarly, there are different levels of EMP hardening. Many civilian device will have a...

You don't need to harden against EMP to avoid wireless hacking, you just need to have no wireless connection. Ok, there are some side-channel attacks that can use wireless signals to get access to a machine without any wireless connection, but they aren't that easy to pull off in real life and you c...

A few years ago, during the avian flu outbreak, the French minister of health ordered a shitload of vaccines. Eventually the flu didn't become pandemic and the health minister became a laughing stock and many people considered that she had just done this as a gift to her big pharma friends. I still ...

Early Christianity believed that end times were near and they just had some time left to clean up their acts. However even if they were eagerly waiting for the end of the world, they didn't try to bring it any closer. Today there are some people who use the end of times argument to support the idea ...

Apparently, this is not how it works. The blessing cannot be transmitted via streaming, because there is something integral to the ritual in the priest physically being there. Apparently the blessing of the eucharist has an area of effect and cannot work over video. But now I want to test this. Lik...

I think there was a minimum distance before it could be considered as charging, but this might come from another game.

<t>For my Shadowrun I decided to have Pink Mohawk be a possible tactics for Black Trenchcoats.<br/> <br/> I have an (optional) rule that considers that people are so "mediatized" that when faced with something out of the ordinary (like a bunch of Shadowrunners attacking a building) they'll fallback ...

Ok, looking back into old 2nd ed 40k. Not quite sure how the Hand to Hand rules are supposed to work. Ok, for models in base to base contact it's pretty clear, but what about the models that aren't? Specifically, if you were to have a genestealer brood that hat been shot to bits and only have 2 ste...

I think that D&D got a sudden popularity boost thanks to the Netflix show Stranger Things.

I'm still having fun with Crusader Kings 2. Gonna leave this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO1VO7VMB_Q I'm not fully convinced. It's a bit similar to how I got ahead in my early game. Sure it's useful at the beginning, but it doesn't break the whole game. The light infantry doomstacks tend t...

I'm still having fun with Crusader Kings 2.

[*]Empty shelves don't happen because of socialism. They happen because of human panic. Capitalism didn't save us from a lack of Charmin. List time I went shopping there were long waiting lines in front of shops (many shops around here limit the number of people who can be inside, and the waiting l...

I can afford them but it's a temporary place and it's 6th floor with a staircase just wide enough for a human so makeshift cardboard furniture looks like the most convenient option