The Gaming Den

Paizo's a believer in the vast power of being slightly better at jumping, PF2 has multiple skill feats to the purpose. Owen was employed by Paizo until very recently.

I can believe that at one prison there's a strong correlation with sex offenders, statistics can do all kinds of things with enough chances, but in general? As against that, the American military has a fair number of people familiar with roleplaying games (lots of time to kill apparently; not unlike...

A staff has a minimum spell package size that's a lot larger than a wand, may not be customisable depending on your campaign, and is just plain bigger and more awkward to lug around. Still, making them a bit different is a decent idea. PF1 did so by making staves 10-charge but easily rechargeable, n...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Amazon dynamically dividing total Amazon Sales by Total Time on Amazon to get sales rank? Otherwise there would be a lot more volatility in the numbers. So if you sell a million books in a feeding frenzy in your first month and never sell any more, you don't drop ...

BTW, anyone know what sort of sales #2000 in books on Amazon means? There's a calculator for that - https://www.tckpublishing.com/amazon-book-sales-calculator/ The P2 core rulebook has a BSR of 2,532 right now. That means roughly 1330 sales per month. The special edition book is rank 52,469, for an...

Monster creation rules are out. I haven't read them yet. A lot of vague stuff. The word 'feel' comes up 14 times. There are tables with suggested values for extreme/high/moderate/low versions of those stats at levels -1 to 24, and some suggestions as to which might go together, e.g. 'Skirmisher hig...

That sounds like Rolemaster, Almanac. Separate stages of the round for movement and spells and attacks, and a couple more things IIRC. It wasn't popular in their implementation at least.

Writing adventures is a major part of Paizo's business. Sharing their stories with you is literally what they get paid the big bucks for.

OTOH Buhlman is terrible at dealing with the public and mostly they have got others to do so in recent years. The clumsiness of that line is a reminder of why.

Swift action congestion, having too many things you could do with your swift/immediate action, was definitely a thing for certain PF1 characters. And having too many possible spells to quickly choose from could be an issue for some players of spellcasters. In PF2 there's no swift action-equivalent (...

If you're asking for suggestions to help with those writeups, here's one. Gemstones store magic and so life. Of course gemstones are pretty small, there's nothing quite like Naica's Crystal Cave for corundum and non-gem crystals are inefficient at storing magic, so Lapidaries have developed techniqu...

If there's one reason RPG designers skimp on playtesting or even having another set of eyes run over their product it's ego. The chances of having their baby denigrated, of having people miss the (to them) obvious point of some feature, or just of getting into a slanging match are pretty strong nega...

Savage Worlds has products to support it, but it's better run with a lot of MTP and not bothering with those anyway. Anathema to the Den I know, but it's a simple game where it's easy enough for the player or GM to write something up between sessions and for them to agree on it. Not a great game for...

There's a lot of reasons not to like Starfinder. 20-level characters and weapons/armor which scale with those levels are a really odd fit for anything science-fictiony. For all they tried very explicitly to wipe out direct connections to the Golarion world its setting originates from, you still need...

The NZ construction industry is astonishingly bad at its job, but that does sound unusual even by those standards. Which town/city is this?

AD&D 1e's Unearthed Arcana, I think. It had barbarians and cavaliers in it - the latter looked like wish-fulfillment enough that we didn't use them. Edit: you could reasonably call the monk in AD&D 1e's players handbook a warrior-type character with its own mechanics. Weird, clunky and not e...

One thing that people seem to like about PF2 is getting to use their movement without AoOs getting in the way often. Sticky zones of control seems to be the opposite of that; your idea might not be as popular in practice as you expect.

Magic actually causing fatigue is something that Ars Magica went with. Also way back a lot of VtM or Werewolf powers cost willpower which the way we played it - no idea whether this was correct - actually lowered your willpower for all purposes. A bunch of powers used the subjects' willpower as thei...

PF2 has sucked the life from PF1; there's no sign that anyone else can breathe life back into it. It doesn't look like PF2 has got enough fans from that to grow on its own, more must have scattered to other RPGs or just gone quiet on the internet. Running with dual stats for D&D 5e does look lik...

Alchemists can make bestial mutagens at L1 if that's their thing. They suck mind you, you'd be better to pick up a mundane weapon but they do exist. I'd say there's only a few things which are outright delayed but practically everything sucks when compared to what you can do in PF1. Their downtime a...

Any island large enough to have a permanent population has its own legend(s) or fairytales, though most surviving tales will postdate Herodotus by quite a lot.

Sicily was supposed to be the island of the cyclops. A quick google suggests Circe's island of Aeaea is fictional.

PF2 has this delightful tag on every ability (not spell- every ability ) in the game with the potential to deny actions): incapacitation (trait) An ability with this trait can take a character completely out of the fight or even kill them, and it’s harder to use on a more powerful character. If a s...

Hunter: furniture, boots, wines, that email verification service and sprinkler irrigation systems.

Ranger: ford ranger car five times, ranger on wikipedia, then ford ranger on wikipedia. Ford's paying a lot for that placement.

I've seen at least one group of 4e fans discussing PF2 approvingly on the web. My non-4e expert eye can see the odd similarity too, though PF2 fans on paizo.com are unable to recognise these similarities. One of those similarities is that since blast spells cannot kill enemies in one go (and you don...

There's not that much variance in the numbers you get assuming you put at least a 16 in your attack stat. Assuming you don't go off the rails and try to make a barbarian who fights unarmed or something anyway (bad barbarian! Fighting unarmed is for monks!) Since the bonuses pull double duty in getti...

So many people willing to give hundreds or thousands of dollars to a Kickstarter which is 13 000% oversubscribed. Have none of them heard of the problems associated with Kickstarters which get too much money?