The Gaming Den

While the local RPGA players/customers have enthusiastly adopted Essentials , sales of pre- Essentials 4E hard covers have dropped to ZERO. Nada. Zip. Zilch. None. On the other hand, the Essentials stuff has done okay, especially the non-version specific stuff, like miniatures and tile sets, and Gam...

My experience of FAT3 is that its action sequences are both long and boring. A PC-level character seriously requires approximately seven (and absolutely no fewer than four) successful attacks to bring them down, and virtually none of a beating sticks between fights. The result is a hideous padded s...

RPG's Strength >> Weakness I have a different perspective from Frank , and to a large extent, I can summarize it as follows: "For people actually playing an RPG, a game's strengths are far more important than it's weaknesses." That is, while it is fun to discuss binding cheese, the wish ec...

In the mid- to late- 80's, there were some experiments done with Go to determine how rankings should really work, how much advantage does the first move yield, and how close to human capacity Go really is. Without going into too much detail, a Go board is 19 by 19 lines. While a few thousand years a...

And yet, that's not what happens, in practice. FATE is not a game for optimizers, for min/max'ers, and indeed, in that case is fail. However, those behaviours are not what I see when I play FATE RPGs. Instead, player's really do mostly share the spotlight. Indeed, I think this speaks to my big philo...

A scene or NPC may have specific aspects on them for a number of reasons: The referee places them in advance, e.g. a "dimly lit," "cluttered" warehouse, an "egotistical" villian, and so on. A player could make an appropriate skill check to discover or declare such an as...

Okay, I can see how you would want a mechanic to make the table slow down and notice the cool, stylish things your character does. But adding a cost just punishes people for giving their character a personality. The way FATE works is that characters (and other "things," like scenes, ships...

Honestly I'm not sure what the point of making granular plot point expenditures and sliding scale costs is. I don't really see the difference between making a declaration that a bar has a particular menu item versus making a declaration that a bar has a particular kind of clientèle. Those really se...

I'd suggest looking at Diaspora , which is a very elegant FATE -based RPG, where story making responsibilities are distributed among the players, not just the GM . Works very well in practice, especially if you are an overworked GM . In FATE generally, one can make knowledge checks, not just to disc...

There's absolutely nothing wrong with FATE . It is solid, playable engine that works well for certain kinds of roleplaying. At conventions I regularly run FATE games (Spirit of the Century and StarBlazer Adventures, mostly) that work like this: 90 minutes: generate characters from scratch 30 minutes...

For me, after OD&D , 3.5 was the first official published version of D&D I played. Right after OD&D , our play group discovered Warlock , the D&D variant co-developed by students at CalTech & M.I.T. distributed on the ArpaNet . It was superior to OD&D , and contained the seed...

While it's not yet on Wizards's web site, it was in the latest Wizards of the Coast printed catalog, as I quoted, on the page I said. Say what you like, it's real, and my sales rep will be soliciting orders for it shortly. Although the release date is not given, based on the products on the nearby p...

In hard copy, it is on page 21 of Wizards of the Coast 2010 Product Catalog, July - December, which was sent to me to solicit for my fall and winter D&D orders.

Smeelbo

In August, Wizards will start selling 8-card booster packs of character powers and items for D&D, allowing "players to play 'limited format' by purchasing a few boosters at a time." No word on rarities.

Smeelbo

Diaspora , a hard sci-fi FATE game, is the ideal RPG book. 250 pages, including index and reference sheets. It's elegant: basicly FATE boiled down to its essence, with multiple, clean sub-systems, that interact well. It makes a minimal number of campaign assumptions, which are explained clearly, an...

I don't know what Frank officially plays, but when we were in his campaign, hacking for us often went like this. We declared an enormous, Rube-Goldberg-like, chain of intent , that is, how we expected the hack to work. Frank broke that chain up into about three pieces: the prepatory work, the main h...

Ten sided dice aren't regular polyhedrons. Those are 4, 6, 8, 12 and 20.

Smeelbo

As far as "Frank's Agenda" is concerned, from personal knowledge I can say with nigh certainty that he has but one actual agenda: Become a physician, and work for Doctor's Without Borders . Frank hates thieves, especially those who steal from workers, and nothing else is required to explai...

When I was FATE-ifying D&D, I had Level ranked from 1-5, like any other skill. In a contested skill test, I applied the difference in levels as a bonus to the higher level character's roll.

Characters can evolve without becoming "higher level."

Smeebo

While there are some complaints about Rise of the Eldrazi for some formats, the fact is that we can't keep it in stock, evening charging $20 more per display than usual. And our suppliers are out of stock as well. Based on what I am hearing, Rise of the Eldrazi really mixes up the Extended Format me...

If I were evil , I would have Essential D&D be the "essence of D&D:" character development and combat framework of D&D , rather like the rules of Magic , then get into the business of selling powers (feat, class, race, items) , rather like selling Magic expansions. And then, fo...

I can tell you that at our store, at least, Magic The Gathering is doing extremely well. We sell almost all the booster packs we receive in less than a week, and that includes the last eight sets: Rise of the Eldrazi, Worldwake, Zendikar, Alara Reborn, Conflux, Shards of Alara and Magic 2010 Core Se...

So far as I can recall, Immediate Actions are all triggered, unless (and I can't recall off the top of my head) prepared actions count (and I don't think they do). So you only have the choice of making an Immediate Action whenever the trigger is satisfied. So, for example, Combat Superiority . Smeel...

In my opinion, the next edition of D&D should only use two die: The d20 and the d6. The d20 gets to be used for 'swingy' rolls that also need to be quick (such as attack rolls and soak throws) while the Xd6 can be used for rolls that benefit from bell curves and less from extrema such as skill ...

As for me, barring special orders, I won't be bringing any new ShadowRun books into the store until the Coleman situation is resolved. Instead, I will be putting our store's dollars into Cubicle 7 , which is offering a broad line of innovative games, and appears to pay its rights holders and contrac...