The Gaming Den

You know D&D is having issues when they're reskinning board games that were infamous for their uneven balance and pacing. This time, they're reskinning Betrayal at House on the Hill as Betrayal at Baldur's Gate. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/228660/betrayal-baldurs-gate I'm curious if they...

You need to encourage the players/characters to make decisions based not on real world conjecture, but on dream logic. If you can fit into the logic of the moment, you can have agency in the dream. This means that it's incredibly easy to take tangential spinoffs within the dreamscape, and as long a...

Players are human beings, human beings look for patterns. When they're confronted with an unknown environment, their initial reactions are generally panic (try everything), observe (try nothing), or experiment (try something, see what happens). In a normal setting, these actions generally all have ...

I mean, unless you just want to go strictly Dungeon Keeper and say "The Forces of Darkness have planted you in the middle of the wilderness as its champions; craft your center of power with which to corrupt and destroy the Forces of Light, and by the way their champions are going to be on thei...

So apparently WW's new Swedish overlords hired Ken Hite to help design VtM 5e (with V20 being the 4th). He talks about it on his podcast. There's also hearsay that Shitmuffin's involved, but it's low veracity even for TTRPG hearsay. Considering that he partially wrote the choose your own adventure ...

I am looking forward to Harebrained Schemes' take on Battletech. I kickstarted it and am waiting for the beta. Curious to see if they mimic the boardgame or if they do a Shadowrun-esque revision.

I didn't do any serious language related prep for my current campaign, however the dwarf Eldritch Knight decided that his culture cared only about Law/Chaos so kept being confused that the Common word "Lawful" didn't instantly connotate "correct and proper and all that matters" ...

Creating language for your world is like creating music for your world. It's beneficial (though still unnecessary) if you have the relevant skill, but will be anti-immersive if you try to just learn enough of the skill to worldbuild with it. The lack of genuine ability will show, and your world wil...

I remember Eclipse Phase... I don't think I ever actually finished reading it. My eyes kind of glazed over at one point.

shlominus wrote:http://dragonfirethegame.com/

seems reasonable. the only question is why did they wait 4 years to copy paizo in doing something like this?

Link doesn't work.

Long story short, you can sustain about a gross of vampires that don't keep Renfields, for about a century before they're exposed. The allostasis of the Masquerade requires supernatural elements of frightening efficiency to maintain even the lower-bound populations being suggested here. Therefore, ...

In Changeling, nobody gives a fuck about you enough to care about crossovers, but your mythical Arcadia is just a small subset of Mage's grand cosmology anyway. Mage exists explicitly to shit on WoD's other settings. Although if a Changeling calls on the Wyrd (God I hate these "y" instead...

If there are 10 million Vampires, and 4.4% of them live in the United States (because 4.4% of the world population lives there) you end up with 440,000. Or 3,375 in Chicago. Those are numbers you could work with and still have meaningful clans and things. And there are 12k police in Chicago, so I d...

A better example would probably be the NSA, which has at best estimates 30-60,000 people working directly for them, not counting the contractors. This is an organization paranoid over secrecy. Seriously, their newsletter discusses how to go out to lunch in order to not leak national secrets. They ha...

I wonder how Werewolf would have gone down if they treated the Triad as a myth creation story. Like... One of the scenarios in Apocalypse was literally you went into the Umbra and saw the Wyrm flying around wrecking shit. The triad was literally something that the Garou *knew* existed. But what if ...

vampires are "of the wyrm" because they frenzy and drink blood. Let's not forget that vampires are "of the wyrm" because werewolves have a spell "gift" called Detect Evil "sense wyrm" and it bings around vampires. Now... You *could* argue that you've just cal...

I wonder how Werewolf would have gone down if they treated the Triad as a myth creation story. Like... One of the scenarios in Apocalypse was literally you went into the Umbra and saw the Wyrm flying around wrecking shit. The triad was literally something that the Garou *knew* existed. But what if i...

If one of your axes is "Destruction" you can't actually have conflict between the other two. If you set up the conflict as between Creation and Destruction between two of the corners, there is nothing for the third corner to represent. I get what you're saying. The problem is that the Wea...

Almost all of the nWOD books suffer from "Why the fuck am I reading this?". Vampire- Took the metaplot away completely, made cities islands that almost never/never had any vampires migrate between the two (ignoring the fact that a vampire could drive from LA to San Diego in 3 hours), and d...

To be fair once you hit about the halfway point you technically qualify as an avowed agent of the Inquisition and get a Rosette and stuff.

But yes, it's mentioned in like... one paragraph. It needs some elaboration.

I ran a massive dark heresy campaign for 2 years. The system is way, way, way too fiddly for combat. Assemble a metric assload of modifiers of plus this and minus that, add to your BS (snicker) score, roll under. If you hit, reverse the number to look up damage location. Blah blah blah. 2 years of p...

http://www.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeek/files/styles/insert_main_wide_image/public/thing-02.jpg Seriously, we're going full John Carpenter already? The amount of meta ignorance here from the original authors is truly impressive. See, The Thing From Another World, in it's 1951 glory, was quite fuck...

Have any of y'all played a D&D game where someone focused on disarming or disarming was a big part of some session critical combat? I like the idea of knocking weapons out of goon's hands, but the hero getting their holy avenger knocked out of their hand then smacked on the shoulder as they wal...

And as far as I know, right now it only has two pieces of fanfic in it, and one of them is co-written by shitmuffin. -Username17 When they announced that the first piece of "We're back!" from White Wolf was "interactive fiction", and that the vampire one was actually called &quo...

I'm curious, do you think as things like tablets and airbooks become more commonplace, do you think there will be more rpgs with systems that take advantage of the fact that players will likely be using digital dice? I mean most of my players already use digital character sheets rather than paper o...