The Gaming Den

It's a fucking bother to carry around a ton of carts. Anyone with a gameboy can tell you that and they've probably got like 8 to 10 games they picked up over the years. More programs than that are initialized just to startup my laptop. I've got more game than that that I don't ever play on Steam ju...

As far as the future of software companies goes, remember that most of the hot, exciting web companies don't actually make money by selling any software. Facebook's power comes from owning the relationship graph, Google makes all their money by advertising, and Amazon, at least for now, is fundamen...

Personally, I'd at least make the weapon pictures a little bigger. Considering that you probably paid between $25 and $100 for each, you should be able to at least see the stupid things. The ideal solution is to just make fake ads for the guns. That's both stylish and cool, even if it's hell on ove...

And why does functional programming take away assignment? Doesn't every functional programming language include assignment operations? I thought that the key to functional programming was having first-class functions. The idea behind functional programming is that most (ideally all) of your code co...

And, since we don't have any new game-changing revolutions showing up any more, then the conclusion is that eventually programming will stabilize into a single language the same way math and science and engineering have each stabilized into common languages. But we do. Strictly speaking of course w...

I really don't see us moving into a truly immersive simulationist VR environment because the idea of Object Oriented programming actually having anything to do with actual objects is the purest of bullshit. The vast majority of OO code is Java business systems operating on "objects" like ...

Relating to Tech instead of Magic, but this video is rather relevant to the Tech side of things: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-testing/bobs-last-language Just from reading the summary I can tell the video is going to be bullshit. Of course we have new programming languages, new concepts, ne...

Three, ala Ghost in the Shell, hacking is straight up mind control, and there is no meaningful difference between flesh minds and machine minds. Forget about augmented reality, you are hacking biofeedback and mesmeric vibrations. Being networked means that you are constantly getting pings from the ...

Lightning Bolt (and indirect spells in general) are good because of their rider effects, not because they let you hit people standing next to a corner. Grenades do that just fine. But grenades don't make people twitch around helplessly and grenades don't let you kill people without killing their ele...

Wtf? You are basically arguing that because x percentage of deflation is fine any amount of deflation is fine. It should be blatantly obvious that this is bullshit. You should be arguing that deflation is going to stay manageable, but of course we do not know whether that will be true. I can however...

Logarithmical growth is extremely suspicious. As far as I can tell, the choice was either completely arbitrary (though I have no idea why they'd do that) or was chosen to get people in in the first place. Bitcoins are infinitely divisible, so there isn't any "scarcity". As the economy exp...

PL, would you mind not spewing utter nonsense? I don't like WoF, but even I can see that it does indeed allow you to cram in more powers into your big list without suffering option paralysis. That is the one thing it does, and it does this well. And by the way, comparing a hypothetical 6x6 list to a...

I find it hard to regard a system that artificially creates valuable tokens and later on makes those same tokens scarce as anything but a variant pyramid scheme. With any other online service you would expect the number of tokens to increase as the number of people who use the service increase. Heck...

I guess the idea was to have a fixed (per character) dicepool, representing how good your character is at the task and then to have a variable TN to represent the difficulty of the task. At face value that seems reasonable. But there is really no way to work out a sensible TN progression with dice. ...

also if you need anything to tell you how to roleplay you probably shouldn't be roleplaying to begin with. seriously, what is wrong with a book saying, "roleplay your traits," because that's basically golden information right there; you can't codify how a trait will be RPed without reduci...

So Tzor, you are really saying that the only issue with embryonic stem cell research is that it is inferior to adult stem cell research? So basically you are fine with cutting up embryos, but you'd prefer to have the same research done on adult stem cells? Fair enough. I don't know whether doing res...

every game is MTP which is why the use of it as a negative is so amusing coming from you people As a negative? How so? MTP is the default for all RPGs. We fall back on it again and again. But, as has been pointed out numerous times, MTP sucks at resolving player conflicts and at being fair. The who...

Does the off-the-shelf Improved Invisibility actually help you against anything that isn't so Impoverished/Unaugmented/Mundane that you wouldn't curbstomp anyway, and feel like a bully for doing so afterwards? You seem to be approaching your evaluation of what is good and what is bad with a duel in...

So you are a mage with a magic of 1, letting you cast up to a maximum of force 2? Am I missing something here?

It is only the mundane AND uncybered character that is at a constant disadvantage. As a system it is very unfriendly to trying to be James Bond or Batman. Heck, even those are fine if you specialize in anything not related to combat. Unless of course you mean totally uncybered, not even a datajack ...

Possession is definitely a way to get all your dicepools up. Of course it is even better if the subject has high dicepools to begin with.

Stunballs are nice, but they only work on humans that you can see. Which is often but not always. "Shoot first, fuck defense" works quite often, but the first time it does not work you are in trouble. As a mage you do have more trouble getting a dicepool large enough to dodge multiple shot...

Actually 6P is what I came up with for grenades. Assault rifles will definitely hurt more. My side of the example again: 6 guards, in jackets, helmets, assault rifles, 3 in all stats and relevant skills, visors with basic vision enhancements and smartlinks. One gun bunny, close to maximized dicepool...

UmaroVI: Your assumptions are faulty. First off, you can not ever give someone more than -6 in vision modifiers, they will just shoot blindly for -6 instead. Secondly you assume that 8P (more like 5 to 6 for anyone you are not directly targeting) is going to hurt. Even assuming guards are as close t...

Seriously, I fail to see the issue. Or rather, I think everyone who believes security is too powerful is deluded. "Then 100 mages go where the cameras show the action and summon 100 spirits" is bullshit. All of those mages are first going to have to find the alert site. This is already har...