The Gaming Den

"All I need in life" would seem to work acceptably.

Everyone in the world is potentially an Absolutist, if you allow for an infinitely large brute-force decision algorithm that takes as input the entire history of the universe and returns as output the action they take. Unless you write in time-travel stuff and declare that in some way it matters tha...

Actionable lesson of the day: Be so wealthy that you can do whatever you want without being accountable to anyone or anything besides your own whims. Thanks, OS, I'll implement your life advice immediately.

Frank has repeatedly talked about his experiences playing Ars Magica, just not 5th Edition specifically. Can you at least not lie about the people you disagree with, Laertes?

Why does that need a Kickstarter at all? The writing of the book is almost finished and parts of it are already in the hands of the editors. The text will be edited by the end of the funding period. The cover and interior art for the book are done (and I've already cleared the artist's schedule for ...

How does Ars handle the LWQW stuff?

Back to the topic, I think it is interesting that some people claim that the text This metal glove lets you deal lethal damage rather than nonlethal damage with unarmed strikes think that means This metal glove lets you deal a maximum of 1d3 lethal damage rather than nonlethal damage with unarmed s...

An asterisk, and a text entry stating that an attack made with the gauntlet deals however much damage the Unarmed Strike would otherwise do plus applicable gauntlet enhancements. I certainly wouldn't expect them to put "1d3" and expect everyone to intuit that what they really meant is &quo...

Okay, Laertes, but what does that have to do with the question of making certain entire races wear the Evil tag? You can make a faction have arbitrarily evil goals and methods without requiring that everyone in their species be Evil.

Probably the "easiest" way would be to roll an icosahedron with sides labelled 5, 10, 15, ... , 100. But those icosahedrons aren't widely-available, so it's still not very easy.

It seems pretty defensible to use a d100 and increments of 5 instead of a d20 because you think "Succeed 75% of the time" is easier for players to parse than "Succeed on 6+". But a physical d100 is less wieldy, however you implement it. Not a slam dunk for either one over the oth...

In D&D, everyone, including Paladins and various other exemplars of virtue, is a murderhobo. So nothing about that description is actually "Evil"--that's just Neutral.

I'm still mad at the Orb of Imposition nerfs.

you sometimes won't have room for a native 2nd level damage spell, and will have to settle for using a boosted 1st level one. I don't understand how this is ever possible, when "a boosted 1st level one" still takes up a 2nd level spell slot in my understanding of the current state of D&am...

It's like, how could an interminable Justin Bieber thread get worse? If the tags got super fucked. Good job everyone, ten out of ten, never stop.

Funnily enough, I've been playing an Elementalist the whole time :V I basically just stick to Fire Attunement 98% of the time, Dagger/Dagger Fire is a pretty fun set of skills. I also tried a Necromancer, got through the level 1 tutorial zone, noticed that I have a funky transform state with its own...

Does every class in Guild Wars 2 operate on a cooldown-only schedule? I mean, at least all the cooldowns I have so far are reasonably short, but still. I appreciate that they've condensed the ability bar considerably compared to other MMOs and you can actually look at the stuff being rendered by the...

Remember that the whole point of the exercise is to set it up so people DON'T use guns and do use swords?

Occluded Sun, unless you specify what you're trying to produce, you can't tell in advance whether beating a dead horse is unproductive. You need to apply your standards to idioms consistently.

Enchanting, Smithing, and Alchemy all have super obnoxious "Scour the continent buying ingredients, mass-craft stuff, immediately sell all the stuff back because it's worthless to you*" loops that you have to repeat dozens if not hundreds of times. I found Alchemy the most annoying because...

Yeah, Alchemy definitely contributes, but it's less mandatory than Smithing and Enchanting and it's also a lot more annoying and fiddly to get ranks in and use. But it's worth mentioning.

I've always found in Skyrim that once you get extremely well-crafted and well-enchanted custom gear, it tends to flatten every enemy at every level and you don't feel powerless. The game's coy about it, but Smithing and Enchanting are the skills that give you real ultimate combat power.

Can you do a fixed-TN dicepool system where you never need to know the literal value of any die? It seems like resolving even a large pile of dice could go very fast if instead of rolling a bunch of polyhedra with numerals on the faces, you rolled a bunch of polyhedra that just had red- or blue-colo...

You've never gone to sleep satiated and woken up hungry? Or needing to piss? Or whatever? Or by "every other organic process" did you mean... something other than "every"? Is "using radically different definitions of common words" just one of those things you do now?