The Gaming Den

At this point, I'm about ready to claim that the existence Bo9S was actually more harmful to D&D than printing a book that was nothing but pictures of SKR's kitty cat. I think what Bo9S attempted was good, what it actually accomplish is a little less stellar. We had 3.5 devs actually try and ad...

I'm not sure it is quite correct to say Conan goes obsolete before level 10. Conan isn't a class, he is a character, and whatever class (or mix of classes) he happens to take should be extensible as far as the system is intended to go, or else they should literally stop at a certain point and tell ...

I don't think Conan should be represented as just one class. His activities are varied enough that any one label doesn't fit him. Unless you want mundanes to have access to ridiculously broad classes, but that only delays obsolescence. Besides grognards don't really want to be Conan. Conan goes obso...

I'm not sure why anyone would need this. Can't you just run an pre-made adventure for yourself without reading it first?

There are a lot of good ways to do this, but they would rankle grognards. If you didn't want to rankle them, for whatever reason then you have to trick them into being something usable. Have classes promote to better classes at level 6, the only options for a Fighter would be Temple Knight (Divine),...

So what was their main sin? Well, in theory and with the benefit of hindsight they should have been able to come up with a game that was mostly improvements over 3.5, although it's complicated by the fact that their target market at the time was "people who mostly like 3.5E and don't want to p...

I think most designers would say yes, but the way they go about it is wrought with failure. This is because, while games like 3.5 suggest how many encounters to have in a day, in play there is no consistency in the wild. Unless you can insert a mechanic that forces players to only rest at certain in...

They mention something interesting in their video. They say they have an independent playtest underway out of their control, how is this supposed to work and would this be better or worse then the standard model of playtesting?

When you are building a mecha game you need to consider why mecha exist in your universe. Gundams are going to have different stats from the Brotherhood's Powered Armour. We had a thread about it here.

I just got this error a few seconds ago: "You cannot make another post so soon after your last; please try again in a short while." . My post still went through though. This was in the "Tropes vs Women" thread in the Video Games forum.

Someone did an analysis of Annita Sarkeesian's thesis here.

I can't comment on whether this is a good thesis for a humanities major. What I can say is that it's bullshit the disparity of work between a masters in arts and a masters of science.

While lame, at least they don't seem to be adding another resource to the game like traits or Ki points. The one upside of a book filled with lame power ups is that it won't induce power creep. Except this is pathfinder, so I expect to see a story feat for casters that makes martials cry themselves ...

There was a novel with set before the Jihad with Jade Falcon LAMs. Each had two pilots, one for piloting in fighter mode and one for mech mode. Also they uncovered a new memory core, the New Dallas core, during the Jihad and that's how we got the royal units. LAMs where cool to me in my preteens, bu...

A less magical/fantastic way to accomplish this is to have each player play a faction or an organization. The organization still exists if individual characters die and it could be used to justify why some characters are very similar as they all had the same training.

I would imagine the mother makes a constitution roll, she's the one doing all the work.

so, will it actually go back to big stompy robots, or will they keep with infantry? Will there be more Three-Legged-Freaks . . err Mechs? Will LAMs make a comeback? Largely they will go back to big stompy robots. I'm sure they will include infantry and vehicles, but not in the starter box. They've ...

So three years is hardly a necro here... CGL is basically skipping the darkages in the timeline. Even if the fans are divided on whether the Jihad and Darkages where a mistake, the writers seem to think so because they are just flying past them. For reference under FASA/Fanpro the writers took 12 ye...

Like kzt I think the standard attack should be directed at the centre of mass. Shots can then have a random chance of hitting the limbs or what not. I don't like a mechanic of aimed shots either hitting the location or missing completely. There are a few ways to handle aimed shots in a mecha game, y...

We don't want to make any assumptions about increased ability scores with leveling. There are two reasons for this. First, that would turn the ability increases into another tax. Second, we're mindful that not everyone who wants to make an attack will max out Strength or Dexterity. A melee characte...

While not a caster per se, have you considered a Warblade? The Warblades strengths covers the Wizard's weaknesses and you will never run out of maneuvers to use on pop corn encounters.

I'm not sure how often Kaelik see PCs drop. Having 1 PC drop per 40 encounters sounds about right. My old group usually played from level one so those deaths where skewed towards the lower end of the spectrum. But higher level PCs did die and some even died in such a way that they effectively couldn...

Does anyone remember the game Exile? Man, I had the funnest times playing those games, and I had no idea what I was doing. Ah, the golden age of PC gaming... I think there where a few different series of games called 'Exile'. If you are talking about the RPG series the continued on into the Avernum...

Maxus wrote:"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent can recognize genius."

I like how this has become "Game recognizes game". History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes.

Gygax is like Mearls in one important way, Gygax basically got the idea from someone else (Arneson). Mearls says he wants to take ideas from everywhere. We can forgive more Gygax a lot more because he was a pioneer. I don't think Gygax hated players, he liked punishing certain types of players. His ...

There are two problems with always (key word always) requiring MCs put in a lot of prep time. The first is MCs get busy like everyone else, so if they can't put in the required hours before the game starts then the game is canceled for everyone. The second is the MC is also a player of the game, for...