The Gaming Den

It's going to be a hero's journey high fantasy Level based game, and I want it to be able to simulate lots of different fantasy classes/tropes, and provide lots of player agency. Every class will have its own fiddly resource mechanics, and the players are exceptionally powerful characters. No offen...

Prak wrote:@Zinegate: The problem with that is that I'm not super familiar with cars myself.

Find a friend or acquaintance who is? It's part of the fun of design.

What do people think of thematic game terms? I'm working on some basics, and I'm debating naming the ability scores with a car theme, so Chassis for body, Shocks for agility, Chrome or Paint for Appearance, and so on, to fit into a 50s car culture milieu. Is it too gimmicky? Too distracting? You sh...

That's the thing, I consider it to be very low complexity. So the whole thing is going to be boring as shit. Yeah, they're high complexity on paper with ridiculous numbers of stats and rules per figure but just buckets of really simple and same-y die rolling in practice, which is why it's boring as...

Alright guys! I'm working a Fantasy Heartbreaker that is based on DnD 3e. One of the first parts of my project was figuring out the RNG. You really need to figure out your system's tone before stressing over the RNG or specific leveling issues. Is this a tale of superhuman heroes who can easily do ...

There's no real sign of it being fun. Do you like regular 40k but want to boil it down to a handful of models but at the same level of complexity per model that was always there? A handful of high complexity models tends to be better than a big battle with lots of high complexity models, but if it'...

Is the game actually any fun though or just a lot of pew pew?

Seems more minis/wargame than RPG, isn't it? Yes, but you're never going to get the cinematic feel of Mad Max if you can't support fast-paced multi-vehicle combat. That's why your 18 round breakdown of the Mad Max fight scene feels much longer than the actual combat scenes. A lot of what you descri...

Also, for a fast straight up Mad Max game, go check out Gaslands. It's about 15 bucks for the ruleset, runs off of Matchbox scale cars. Solid if not spectacular engine combining a press your luck element when you go faster, and the movement templates from stuff like X-Wing. Best part is that aside ...

This is a one-off post. When we discuss rules and mechanics in TTRPGs we have to assume that there are only a finite number of finite tasks associated with carrying out any given rule or mechanic. So as cool as it is to say "there's infinitely many different schemes for rolling dice", onl...

I was part of the 3rd Ed wave, and played my first game around 2001 when I was 18. I was aware of D&D before then as I had played the old SSI computer games but it wasn’t until my second year of college that I met and played with my first DM. It was a hilarious one-shot where were stuck in a vil...

Oh, fuck off. You're actually promoting fucking 4e skill challenges as a desirable outcome, where people are rolling dice over and over to get a particular ... just fuck off. How you went from tension-building of dice-rolling from Risk to claiming I am promoting 4E skill challenges (I've played 4E ...

:rofl: Zine, are you seriously arguing that something didn’t happen because it is stupid? You’re running the risk of your post being a paradox. No, I'm saying that it's stupid for WoTC to pick that slogan even if it did happen. It's a slogan that makes you question the basic competence of the produc...

:rofl: Sorry, but I find it hilarious that this "discussion" kept on going and going and going over the holiday season because certain posters kept insisting on their bad-faith notion that math / system was ever an explicit marketing point rather than an implicit one. Again, look at the ac...

Zinegata, you are missing the entire point of the hype behind 4e. It wasn't that people wanted an edition touted as having solid math behind it because they loved math. You do realize that I keep saying that "good math is an implicit expectation"; which is pretty much everything that you ...

The first thing a customer sees when they enter a store is the covers. Do you want to turn half of them off by making the cover scream MATH instead of DRAGON? People don't PRE-ORDER an RPG book based on the cover. I'll tell you the reason my RPG group pre-ordered the 4E core books: it was the "...

Except that we're talking about a role playing game where the player characters often expect to get significant windfalls in the form of treasure. So while it's not particularly important how much it costs to eat cabbage versus kale, you still need prices in coin for all the stuff it matters that t...

[quote="FrankTrollman] The problem with this claim is that 4e D&D had the highest number of pre-orders of any D&D book. Some of that is doubtless just the change in internet culture and the way people buy things between 2000 and 2008. But a significant factor has to be that when WotC to...

So we know that D&D prices for stuff in chunks of gold is nuts, are there any good alternatives that somewhat follow historic time periods? I think that trying to set prices based on commonplace items is a largely futile exercise. The idea of money being a means of exchange was not particularly...

deaddmwalking wrote:If abstracting the battle involves inputs and outputs the players can toggle to achieve real effects, congratulations - you're describing a mass combat mini-game.

Color me amused by the very low bar you set for defining a "mini-game" just for want of posturing.

My experience says your premise is wrong. Lol. Look, if it works for you, then more power to you. I just find the Internet's general need to posture "I'm right you're wrong!" to be pretty amusing nowadays given what it really reflects :). What I don't think you realize however is that you...

I'll try to meet you on this one. While wargames may have no place for plucky heroes, RPGs DO have design space for dehumanized soldiers. We call them mooks, or minions, or trash mobs, or a dozen other monikers, but they all serve a single purpose: to stand around dressing up the scenery until the ...

In the thread about "how do we make a working wargame as a minigame of D&D", "you don't" is not a valid answer. Sorry, but that kind of thinking is also precisely why there are so many pointless mini-games in many other RPGs; like the infamous Hammerhead driving sessions or ...

If you have a resolution system the players won't know how the battle will go if they don't intervene, but they should have the ability to figure the odds. *sigh* You do realize that multiple people - aside from myself - have already pointed out that my system does have a very abstracted resolution...

@Zingata: I don't know if you got that Math is the most important things in an RPG from my OP, but if so, I'm not arguing that. I am arguing that the underlying math and the system is a very important part of the game that seems to not have as much attention paid to it as other parts of the game, a...