The Gaming Den

The genie isn't banning you from owning any number of RPGs, though. You can buy (or otherwise acquire) as many RPGs for the art as you want. You can just only play three of them. That seems like an improvement on my current situation, where the only games I get to play are Pathfinder (1ed) and Call...

Dragon Age is fine for wandering around a fantasy world engaging in fairly mundane adventures. I assume the computer game is a bit more “high fantasy”, but I’ve never actually played it. They push you towards random character creation – my dwarf character got something like 3 racial abilities, and o...

Dogbert wrote:That depends on whether you actually sell the system properly or you fell for the sales brochure of games like Night's Black Agents and Mutant City Blues.

Thanks for the interesting response.

And yes, I certainly did fall for the sales brochure!

Basically, he'd describe a scene and as long as you understood which skill to use in the 3e play of that scene, you could just say your character was doing that and you'd succeed, because there was no skill check to fail in the first place. As I understand it, it does depend on the GM, but the more...

Gumshoe is to detective work what Guitar Hero is to actually playing guitar... it is not, but it lets you pretend you're doing it while actually just putting you in charge of more menial things you can actually do (like the combat minigame). How do your players find the rest of the game? Mine weren...

[quote="Thaluikhain]There's Orcs that serve any evil master they can find.
[/quote]
There was an interview with Dave Morris where he said he included Orcs because he felt he had to, but he never used them in his home games as they didn't fit the feel of the game.

Not sure about the original Sphere of Annihilation rules, but in 3.5 it does say "Any matter that comes in contact with a sphere is instantly sucked into the void" so going hand first won't help as the rest of the body gets pulled and it's too fast for any screaming. In the 2nd edition Re...

I admit I’m not very familiar with fatal's core mechanic. I can't remember if this is from FATAL or some other awful system, but - first roll 1d100 to find out the probability to succeed, then roll 1d100 and see if it's below that to tell whether you did. That is, flip a coin in an overly complex w...

That said, any edition of DL should begin with an updating of the war of the lance adventures. The main practical problem I have with the idea of running those adventures is that they split off into two separate, simultaneous quests at the end of part 1. You either have to have a huge number of pla...

Nothing. It says nothing. Entirely up to Mister Cavern, I guess. The PCs could be taking their swag back up to the surface and it just rots off in a couple of weeks. I seem to remember that Unearthed Arcana (1985) had "playable" Drow, and that the Drow equipment rotting rules were mention...

Why are you talking about Fate? Blades is an Apocalypse World offshoot. I dunno. I thought it was more Fate based because it is published by Evil Hat? If I'm remembering correctly, the Kickstarter was originally an independent project, but when it started hitting serious delays the author brought i...

I know why attributes exist, they simplify and they ensure that even if the strong man has no points in athletics they're still at least a little better at rock climbing than wimpy mcnoodle arms up until the latter gets fly. In FATE Core, you might have no idea how strong your character is, and not...

Are their any systems that forgo attributes entirely and only have skills? I feel like at least one of the versions of FATE does this but I'm not sure. Fate Core does this. However, in Fate Core it is perfectly possibly to only have six skills, and to call them Strength, Dexterity etc. That's what ...

Goodman Games to update old 1E modules for 5E. That's one way of putting it. Seems like it is a luxury collector's hardback with umpteen different versions of B1 and B2, together with lots of interviews, commentary and extra encounters. I can't see anyone buying this strange accumulation of dispara...

Sleigh Ride seemed to me to be more of a pulp adventure than a horror one. I have an irrational fondness for it, probably because despite being a lot shorter than the other USSR adventures it packs in much more action, and isn't so relentlessly bleak.

My problems with Shadows over Leningrad are :- Either too many or not enough yetis (I’d prefer either no yetis, or lots of yetis like in Sleigh Ride). Having the odd yeti as window dressing is a waste. Everybody needs to have “Speak Russian” for the adventure to work, which is ok, but just handing i...

I really like Machine Tractor Station Kharkov 37 as a Call of Cthulhu horror story. The Colour Out of Space leads to massive increases in local grain production, with commendations and medals all round, and then the grain turns out to be utterly inedible. So people starve to death. Taking what was a...

Huh. I guess they're somehow IP enough to be excluded from the SRD. As far as I can tell, everything (like Slaadi) that was excluded from the 3rd edition SRD has been excluded from the 5th edition one as well. Of course, given that pixies are also excluded from the 5th edition SRD (despite being me...

I thought d20 Star Wars WAS Saga. There was that, which people didn't like, and then there was the d6 one, which people apparently did like. WotC did a d20 Star Wars, then a d20 Star Wars (revised) and then Star Wars Saga edition. D20 Star Wars seemed to me at the time (although my memory is a bit ...

It also mentions that arcane magic is mistrusted because it seems to be the power of one of the Titans and might be reviving him, and also that it generates a lot of waste heat so that most arcane casters dress like Vallejo characters and take double ASF. I think both of those are mentioned in pass...

Given the whole "bounded accuracy" thing they are so proud of, what is the point of the ability score increases anyway? What are they supposed to achieve? (What they actually achieve is to make it look like WotC did some actual game design, whilst letting them get away with providing a der...

So my question is: if D&D 5E isn't worth jumping into with both feet, is there anything worth salvaging from it and transplanting into 3.X? Anecdotally, what the two 5th edition players I know liked about it was the lack of complexity. I think they found it restful (for want of a better word) a...

[*]I kind of like adventures that call back to previous adventures, so this at least has that going for it. Call backs are nice, but in this case you'd better hope that you didn't fuck up the first adventure. And I seem to remember that not only did the first adventure NOT tell the DM that the plot...

So, the first product WotC have announced for 2017 is ... a collection of 7 previously published adventures, converted to 5th edition. (One of which, Tomb of Horrors [sigh] has apparently already been converted to some version of D&D Next in Dungeon.) Seems like a horrible lack of ambition, or i...

hogarth wrote:What did your players think of the fight on the trapped elevator or the fight in zero-gravity? Were they interesting or mostly a pain in the ass to run?

I can't really remember any details of those, so I guess that rules out interesting!