The Gaming Den

On the topic of what they are calling verisimilitude : the great unspoken assumption of RPGing is that the DM will not try to kill your characters. The problem with this being an unspoken assumption is that there are hordes of people who are full Dunning Krueger about permadeath and long-lasting and...

I guess DnD is just going to have to find a way to survive without rapping dwarves.

To be perfectly honest, I'd describe "high-level" single player Stellaris as more of a toy than a game. The PvP community find things to be well-balanced with a rather short banlist. Do people actually care about competitive PvP for Paradox games? I've spent dozens of hours dicking around...

Korwin wrote:Stellaris is an rpg?
New to me...

Yeh, it bills itself as "grand strategy." I don't think they know what those words means, but then they aren't native English speakers.

In my experience, the most fun traps are the ones that players interact with MTP-style. This is where we got the 10' pole, and why it's been the MVP of many a grognard's old-school adventuring party. I mean, it doesn't matter what the DC is to find and disable a pit trap because it is always going t...

I think I've played enough Stellaris and enough versions of it to just say that it's a bad game. There are no tactics to the combat, just some light Rock/Paper/Scissors to ship design. There is no strategy to the war-fighting, just having bigger and more piles. There is no fun to the planet building...

There's a bit of a double standard here in that casters expect to have full access to the spell list and to be able to pick and choose, whereas if a fighter brings the same expectation it's frowned on. I know people regularly bitch about the idea that you can walk into a town and trade a bunch of d...

I'd let downtime be a way to rack up social bonuses. So the guy who goes back go his castle and manages his lands gets bonuses with nobles, and the guy who smiths in a community get bonuses with the commoners. And then there is the wanderer Gerald of Rivia, who spends his downtime having sex with so...

For the rest, being able to win the game in character creation is obviously somewhat of a failstate of the game and organic advancement is uh...questionable in a game with a very clear and very obvious measuring stick (levels). If we were to simply put in the DMG 'These classes underperform, they n...

The goal of good abstracted movement system is that fighting in a forest should feel different from from fighting in a plain or a crowded bar. Also, the ability to cast wall of stone should mean something.

Any power that you gain through adventuring should just be a class feature, be that a magic item or strange talent gained by training or supernatural investment. I'm gonna stop you right there and ask you to elaborate on this because every way I spin it in my head seems really unfun. Just curious w...

A new update of note came out recently! The highlights are: A modest overhaul of the Jotun nations' lineups (EA Niefelheim, MA Jotunheim, LA Utgård) as well as the introduction of a new splinter nation: LA Vaettiheim, a nation of goblins and Gygja An visual overhaul on the Jotun nations, with some ...

All restaurants and similar establishments have been closed here, which means a lot of people are out of work. Our city council is aware that means they can't make rent. The solution is twofold. Give money to the companies and landlords who are losing money right now, and do more to punish all of t...

San Francisco and the Bay Area are under a Shelter in Place order. This means "it is permissible for people to leave the house for facilities related to the following activities defined as essential: law and safety; essential government services; health care; pharmacies; child care; farming; g...

Any power that you gain through adventuring should just be a class feature, be that a magic item or strange talent gained by training or supernatural investment. Taking that into consideration, I see no problem to letting Fighters get more magic item slots and spellcasters getting almost none other ...

San Francisco and the Bay Area are under a Shelter in Place order. This means "it is permissible for people to leave the house for facilities related to the following activities defined as essential: law and safety; essential government services; health care; pharmacies; child care; farming; g...

San Francisco and the Bay Area are under a Shelter in Place order. This means "it is permissible for people to leave the house for facilities related to the following activities defined as essential: law and safety; essential government services; health care; pharmacies; child care; farming; gr...

I really feel like most skills systems just create Failure Theater. Everything gets turned into a roll, and the only way to make rolls exciting is to include a chance of failure, and those two facts means PCs fail at basic tasks all the time like a slapstick comedy . I can't tell you how many PCs ha...

I think Pathfinder is the test of whether you can grandfather's ax a popular RPG into another one. The problem is that you can't ever attack core assumptions of the game. You can't do diceless with DnD. You can't go class-less, or level-less, or remove the six base stats, because if you do any of th...

If you don't want your players to go into "5 minutes workday" then perhaps don't make of each and every encounter a "fierce battle to the death where the heroes barely escape doom by the skin of their teeth." Just saying. Except that's not possible. The fight that is easy at 100...

I'd vote against the "mostly easy encounter". Combat just takes way too long in most games. My last session literally had us asking the DM "can we just assume that we win this since the boss for this adventure is dead?" Twice. Gotta love pre-canned adventures. Gloomhaven is a tac...

If your party is already risk-adverse, removing full rests could easily lead to them leaving adventures altogether.

I used to see it a lot in Living Greyhawk. Parties would leave before the final fight because they weren't at full resources, but had gotten some XP and treasure.

I've been kind of impressed with Dungeon Crawl Classics version of the Cleric. They use press-your-luck mechanics for spells. Each time you cast, there is a random chance of pissing off your god. As points of pissed-off-god accumulate, your normal spell roll gets an increasingly large chance of some...

Weirdly, DnD contains both the worst and best examples of illusions. The worst is the ones that let you control the horizontal and the vertical. Imagination leads to insta-win, or the DM nerfs it into uselessness. The best is spells like Mirror Image . It clearly defines what it does, it defines exa...

Magic items in effect form are things like the various books and tomes that burn out in exchange for giving you a permanent effect, usually a bonus because DnD is not that creative and only has a few examples. For example, there is a Sorcerer version of the Librum of Silver Magic in one of the Drag...