The Gaming Den

The first season of Limetown is really good. It's an x-files esque conspiracy story delivered in the style of a public radio interview series. Definitely recommended. (The second season is kind of a shitshow; I gather that this is because the first season's writers focused on chasing a potential TV ...

Why does the dungeon design in Heavensward get better? Is it solely due to enemy placements, or is there interesting spatial design or better loot distributions or something?

1) How do you actually run a good mystery game in tabletop RPGs? You could probably do worse than starting with the advice given by the TheAlexandrian dude: https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15151/roleplaying-games/game-structures-part-5-mysteries I also recently discovered that the guy who did ...

Has anyone played through all of the extended Circle of Eight content for Temple of Elemental Evil? I've been replaying ToEE, first time with the new content. I've finished the main game and have moved onto the extra quests, and I've run into two bugs: One of the possible wilderness encounters I get...

So something I’m not clear on, did greeks or romans view their pantheons as historic truth watching them like how Simpsons Christians do, or did they view it more like being a hardcore fan of a certain band, a good luck ritual, a metaphor for human psyche? The answer I usually see put forward is &q...

Jamie surviving is rather bullshit since he is nowhere near the fighter he was. Has the show decided how good Jaime is as a swordsman now? In the books, it's made pretty clear that he's basically useless, but the show had him doing a training montage with Bronn, and then he does okay for himself wh...

Designed to supplement some rules that aren't republished here and long out of date, this is a very long set of really idiosyncratic rules which I lack a lot of context for (spell levels appear to go up to 18th, for example). Some of these aren't bad ideas - like using blood magic to create a magic...

Why did you use PBTA as the baseline engine, instead of Shadowrun 4 or GUMSHOE or whatever?

I don't want more Bloodlines because I'm desperate to see what's happening in oWoD LA, I want more Bloodlines because it was really well made. Give the name to some random other team and it's just another vampire game. We don't get a ton of vampire games, so I'll keep my eye on them anyway, but I'm...

So nobody is going to point out that all the information in the premise post is jibberish? ... Emerald already made a number of responses to your point. I want to emphasize their point of The effects of FR adventures are incorporated into later adventures, novels, and setting books all the time, ac...

If you're making an RPG setting, is there a best strategy for advancing the setting's metaplot / what companies and creators have handled metaplot advancement the best and worst? I've seen a few classes of strategy that all have positive and negative aspects. Forgotten Realms style: Have your settin...

While everyone has heard of this, one wonders how many people (esp current gamers) have actually played it. I have run it with two different groups, once in 3.5 and once in one of the AD&D retroclones, although neither got to the end. The first group had a fair amount of fun -- one character ev...

Umbrella Academy is so good,I don't even mind that the shootouts look like absolute, utter shit. I enjoyed the first five or six episodes, but I found the plotting dragged more and more as the show went on. Typical Netflix original content, I guess. Also, I'm unsure whether the idiocy/incompetence ...

I also did scoundrel when I played it. I think the first major boss battle was sort of difficult / tedious because of fragility, but the skills you get make the game a lot more enjoyable. Neither KotOR is all that difficult.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:Literally nothing is different if Bojack Horseman isn't a horse.

Except that the puns are a lot less funny.

Tracking the position of a large number of enemy agents. Invisible Inc has a really tight implementation of party-based turn-based stealth, but it partially relies on the computer tracking the position of every guard in a level, even when the party is nowhere near them.

Ugh I hate jumping to this thread after I was so hyped about Limetown Season 2 in the 'rocked you' thread but it was such a massive letdown. Apparently the original writers are busy trying to break into the TV industry and a new writing staff was brought on to do season 2 and to pump out a very med...

Also, a reason many people play Paradox games is map-painting. For these people, it is dissatisfying to end up with a messy-looking map after spending so much work cleaning up territories.

I think magic points are better than Vancian for modeling buff spells. In Dragon Age: Origins, for example, while they are active, buff spells reduce a caster's total available spell points. Attack spells have a one-time spell point cost as normal. All spells also have cooldowns, which prevent caste...

CharOp people used to care a lot about the Ruby Knight Vindicator ("Windicator"), I remember. The PrC's interaction with the swift action economy was lauded. Example paeans: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthre ... Windicator

What rules-fu does the assassin need to compete? Ideally, you need some way of activating death attack in a single round. You also need to be willing to dumpster dive for useful spells. Otherwise, you're likely to feel a bit small in the pants. Tome content is susceptible to powercreep just like ev...

The last time I ran a Tome game, which was a while ago, the party was a Tome Assassin, a ThunderGod Cid Ranger, a Koumei Gadgeteer, a Koumei Warmage, and a Hicks Dread Necromancer. Most of the players were new to D&D, so I think I helped them pick out classes that matched what they wanted to be ...

The purpose of resource management systems is to break up the monotony of players using the same abilities over and over again. That's at best partially true. Another useful and orthogonal purpose is to limit the number of tasks you can accomplish in a given timeframe. This ensures that a cycle of ...

Verdict: Crap. This is one of those abilities that is almost generic across multiple classes, as it is used by multiple classes with almost the same wording. It's also nerfed all to hell to prevent multiclassing shenanigans (which is the entire point of a gish to begin with) and interacts with a sh...

Another option might be that 13th Age game. It's a bit more complicated Numa-numa from what I can tell, but it's also more D&D-like. Its metagame powers seem like they might mesh well with an AP.