The Gaming Den

The Essentia Necromancer just shouldn't get anything powerful enough that you need to limit it on a per-day basis. He should be roughly equally effective every round, with the allocation of his essentia pool adjusting how powerful different pieces of his kit are. You can give his personal abilities ...

Any reason not-Shadowrun, not-D&D and not-VTM can't be the same setting in different time periods (future, past, present)? The biggest issue is that D&D is second-world fiction, while VTM and Shadowrun are definitely set on Earth (with modifications, timeline advancement in Shadowrun, etc)....

The thing that needs to be true for a chunk is not that it can be generated without any information about other chunks, just that each stage of generation can be done with only information produced by earlier stages of other chunks. When you go to generate a chunk, you can produce the ground without...

Jury-rig is... bad. Like, really bad. Downright punitive, to be honest - I think a savvyhead without the move could just say he's trying to jury-rig something and get a better deal from the MC than you're giving. Four negative options and only getting to pick two on a 10+ is really cruel - even when...

In Apoc World it's typical for a playsheet's main stat to start at +2 and not advance (see the stats section in the upper-left of the second page).

I think I'd go with actual classes, for a couple reasons. The biggest is that it keeps relative bonuses under control - you don't get a scenario where one player pours all his points into stats and has nothing to do but say "I attack" while another player puts everything into active abilit...

Standard deviation is a really big deal for bonus size - the smallest bonus that people are really going to remember and feel in play is one that shows up on at least one roll in 10 when you're near the center of your game's bell curve. The smaller your standard deviation relative to the full range ...

30 seconds is a really short amount of time, like barely enough to declare movement, move a mini, announce an attack, roll it, see if it hit, and roll damage. I'd expect that they probably want some fluff in there in terms of posturing and talking about how awesome their characters are, but don't wa...

Picked up Infinifactory a couple weeks ago, just finished it today. It's a puzzle game about designing factories in a minecraftish interface, by the maker of Spacechem. It's pretty short at the moment, about 10 or 12 hours without going too crazy with optimization, although it is early access and th...

Just got reminded of Hammerfight. It's a game where you play a helicopter that swings a wrecking ball and fight other wrecking ball helicopters. It's surprisingly fun - it's not super deep, but there's a rhythm to it once you get it figured out.

You certainly don't want to say "Oh, yeah, libertarians turn into bonobos because of their political opinions", but it might be fine to say "the last members of the resistance to Akkad II ran off into the woods and lived like werewolves and that's where gorillas come from"

Usually it means something between those - things that you can get away with saying without an explicit power source, but still beyond what's attainable for any actual human. Generally it's stuff you might see in an action movie but not in real life, or the kind of default hyperathleticism that supe...

We want a setting where clan loyalty matters, but NOT AS MUCH as loyalty to your daimyo. It's not that hard to say "yes, your clan is a big part of your life but when there's a conflict of interest between your clan and your daimyo you are expected to side with your daimyo". Also, it's not...

Up until fourth edition, there were variable dice pools and variable per-die targets, which is a big no-no, so fourth is the one you'd want to start with if you're trying to steal base mechanics. Fifth I'm unfamiliar with, but I'd be surprised if it was better than 4th, given that Catalyst was mostl...

The demand-based productivity track leads to some pretty silly terminology - in particular you're labeling worlds by what they consume rather than what they produce, which is just Wrong. When you say "industrial world", I (and probably everyone else) expect that to mean a world with lots o...

A gadget creation system like Dragonmech's is the last thing I'd want. I really don't want to sit down and figure out how to build a flamethrower from parts, I want to announce that I just whipped up a freeze ray and go to town. Basically, given a half hour of downtime, any major character spark mig...

Gear The main contribution of the Gear chapter is the Gadget rules, which are stupid, because wealth is stupid. Basically, each gadget has a purchase DC modifier, which gets added to the purchase DC of the gear being modified. This almost seems to make sense, until you realize that purchase DCs are...

The Campaigns chapter is 22 pages long, and is basically a bunch of article-length setting/campaign sketches jammed together. It would have been better off if it had been longer - as it stands, each setting gets one advanced class and maybe an item or monster, when they really could have used two o...

Honestly, I don't really blame them for it - the core book established that you didn't get much interesting stuff per hit die, and they're mostly just following the pattern that the original advanced classes laid down.

Chapter One: Characters There's a little bit of introductory text about how you need to talk to your GM about what's available, which isn't entirely unreasonable. That's really about it for body text here, so the rest of this is just going to be stream of consciousness about skills and feats and su...

d20 Future is a setting book for d20 Modern, and has a lot of its failings - in particular, the core classes are totally borked because of the strong/fast/tough/smart/wise/charismatic hero thing, and a hard class-based d20 system game doesn't make too much sense for the modern day anyways, but it's ...

The stars can totally see you during the daytime, bro

Here's a writeup for some Oathsworn pacts and their limitations. I'm figuring these should be fairly substantial character-shaping things, with an always-on benefit, an activated major ability that costs edge or something similar, and a big limitation. I'm also thinking about having them grant an ed...

I think I'd rather go with a lighter-weight combat system than that - this doesn't feel like the sort of setting that wants measurement to be a big deal. Personally I'm leaning towards something like Spirit of the Century's zone mechanic. I've been picturing charms as somewhat more common, with a ra...