The Gaming Den

Also, a heroic-tier encounter-level obstacle can be interesting for paragon characters as part of a bigger situation - if it takes time/spell slots/etc. and there's time pressure or if you want to bring more people or stuff than the standard paragon solution supports

The feature set is basically the obvious features for a campaign management system. They're putting a lot of focus on the indexing, which is a good sign. The auto-linking is a good idea, although it might have issues if you name things words that you use a bunch. It's not clear how useful it will be...

Let's use the actual terms the military uses: AM (anti-materiel) for things that you shoot at stuff with high AV and AP (anti-personnel) for thing you shoot at stuff with high SV. If we were writing this for military personnel instead of, y'know, gamers, that would make some sense, but the majority...

What actually matters in an infinite environment is the relative density of people making hats of disguise to people wanting to buy them, assuming the sets have equal cardinality (probably they're countable, but that's not important). If travel were free, this could theoretically cancel however we w...

The DMing style that Dungeon World demands is very different from the default DMing style in D&D. The mechanics give players opportunities to inject their own ideas into the setting, and the DM advice section encourages asking them for input, even as part of the game's flow. When this goes well,...

The yucky-soundingness gives it that Mythos feeling :p Yeah. The Lemurians should have the clean and sterile ipod look in their tech, and should be a lot more like us, though with heavy emphasis on AI drones. The Union should be just gross enough to seem almost inhuman. I don't think we want to pos...

I think breaking 40k needs some fairly substantial name recognition or a golden elevator pitch. Maliszewski is one of the biggest names in the OSR blogosphere, so he has a body of work online, and the OSR guys tend to buy and shill each others books a lot. Heinsoo and Tweet had their names on the fr...

Frank's claim specifically included spending fate points or whatever gumshoe's equivalent is. It's not that Siege Engineer isn't more widely applicable, it's that in the presence of an explicit resource that governs how many times you get to apply it, the potter can spend points to make pottery usef...

Forging a sword is much more metal than enchanting one, but it should have eldritch runes on it or something if it's going to be magic. For major weapons, blind/ancient/badger smiths, dragon blood, starmetal, etc. are a hard requirement. Having a sword made out of actual fire is reserved for jedi an...

Kaelik, just get out. People in here are trying to talk about things like Beowulf and Lancelot and all the other mythological literary characters that don't have what their setting labels as Official Magic TM but are nonetheless capable of feats that generic shit-covered peasants aren't, because the...

Been playing around with mechwarrior online a bit. pretty fun, but... learning curve is pretty steep - the control scheme is "realistic", so mechs can only go forward and back with the torso twisting above the legs. it's wasd+mouse, but the controls are more like vehicles in other games th...

I haven't heard anything about Dark Millenium Offline since they cut the MMOness out. I'm still really hopeful - Darksiders 1&2 proved that they can handle the visual aesthetic of 40k well, and THQ and GW have worked well on Dawn of War and, to an extent, on Spehss Mehrine (it ran into budget pr...

The Hacker Crackdown seems to be a good sociological treatment of hacker culture in the late 80s for a lay audience, but not especially relevant to game mechanics. Most of the technology it talks about is obsolete, especially on the computer side of things. BBSes gave way to hosted forums when priva...

From a real-world perspective, there's a few different kinds of "hacking". I'm mostly going to be talking about the computer science side of things, rather than the social engineering aspects. There's a number of steps to the classic form of hacking, most of which are best done in the comf...

It looks like Genesis is using cards as their resolution mechanic and RNG, not as representations for spells/abilities/items. They've got some clever ideas for tying wounds and XP into their core mechanic, but the whole thing might be too gimmicky in actual play. Also, depending on how the deck crea...

Warhammer 40k's setting is what 80s British frat boys thought would be funny put into a grim and gritty fantasy world, remade IN SPAAAAAACE, turned up to 12, and then taken semi-seriously for a couple decades. Major factions include battle nuns with 80s hair and literal cathedral-tanks, green mad-ma...

So, I picked up WH40K:SPEHSSMEHREEN in the Steam sale and played through it last week. Although it claims to be a third person shooter, it's really somewhere between that and a God of War style action game. The singleplayer does a really good job of getting the feel of the setting right. For the mos...

as far as I know, Ifrit are from Arabian folklore. There were Islamic governments in Iberia from the 8th century to 1492, so putting them there almost makes sense. Them having sultans and whatnot instead of kings and viceroys and such still screws with my head a bit, to be honest.

The Sidhe's vulnerability to iron has some interesting implications. I would expect iron to be used only when absolutely necessary, or to be plated in something else. Maybe typical weapons will be made of iron, because sidhe won't touch the business end unless you want to hurt them, but nails, hinge...

Bands that you probably haven't heard of: The Gaslight Anthem - sound like a young punk Springsteen? probably my favorite newish band. Also, their lead singer is a fantastic acoustic soloist and troll ITP: an egyptian electronic band Matisyahu: a Hasidic Jewish reggae artist Northern Kings: a Finnis...

jagadul: FTL communication with no signal delay (the signal arrives at the same time it was sent in the reference frame of the sender) doesn't let you violate causality unless the two endpoints are in different reference frames. now, what you seem to be proposing is one where a radio response arrive...

You need to have a little bit to say about everywhere, even if it's just "We don't go to Ravenholm". It's one thing for two campaigns to have totally different answers to mysteries, but not for two campaigns to have different answers about what the mysteries are.

Catharz: functions that you can pass around and curry and the like are generally referred to as "first class functions". You can force these into any programming language if you try hard enough, but you usually don't want to unless it's necessary. The name functional programming derives fr...

You could say that it would follow paradigms like FP or OOP, because you'd be dealing with imaginary physical objects that could be decomposed or composed to an arbitrary degree of abstraction, but the current concept of paradigms would be almost meaningless. I really don't see us moving into a tru...

That's an interesting talk, but programming languages are largely irrelevant - the differences he lists are just not things the story is interested in. When someone sits down and works on a Large Program, it's going to look, from the average player's perspective, about like it does today. Maybe the ...