The Gaming Den

So there is a LITTLE bit of oddness in Blizzard responding immediately before Tencent upper management should really have gotten involved, versus Epic publicly proclaiming they wouldn't pan someone over something like that. There is some real place to wonder at what level this decision was really m...

On a (mostly) unrelated note, I remember a conversation I had with a game dev where they outright derided the idea of verisimilitude being SUPER FUCKING IMPORTANT when it comes to RPGs. It kind of blew my mind. How can a game feel meaningful if there's no sense of internal consistency and your mech...

I think we just found the definition of "modern RPG design."

Do the Infinity Stones have to be used for any particular purpose to prevent a Bad End for a given timeline? In my 2 viewings of the film, I understood Tilda Swinton's comments about the Stones and the nature of the universe to mean "the Stones are vital to the universe itself maintaining coher...

Was wondering, how much time does a published setting need to describe things clearly based on well known things? I mean, if you are doing the real world + vampires, you'd probably want to concentrate on the "+ vampires" bit, if you are sticking dinosaurs into your fantasy game you probab...

Lately I've been playing far more board games, particularly Descent 2e, than any RPG. Even within the much more constrained scope of action available to a hero in Descent as compared to an RPG character, the rules still leave plenty of room for interpretation and confusion. The unofficial faq is 60 ...

I was wrong. I missed the spoiler box that explains that the Zurich Orbital retransmitters are outside the Faraday cage and connected by wires. I didn't know where you had come up with the idea "Zurich Orbital is inside a Faraday cage" and thought you had lost your mind.

What kind of bank server would be isolated inside a Faraday cage? When you can't access a server, that's called "downtime" not "security." If you have some kind of account or transaction data stored on a server, you need that to be accessible so that you can use it to facilitate ...

I am in a place of deep frustration when it comes to finding new fantasy books to read. In particular, when I go looking for recommendations, I get lists of things that are bad . Every list has The Name of the Wind on it, usually highly ranked. I have no fucking clue why anyone thinks that book is ...

They are a wargames collectible miniatures company that knows less than nothing about any military, modern or historical. FTFY That's how GW thinks of itself, how they present themselves to investors, and how they make their business decisions. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,...

And even then, Zeus didn't supply a white-washed version of the story in which Agamemnon had taken Achilles' favorite golden chariot or whatever, it actually drew attention to the fact that they weren't telling you why Achilles was angry. That is called lying by omission and that is still very much...

My question is, essentially, does this seem like a thing that would let people actually run mysteries. If I published a book of 100 of these do you think that would effective as a way for DM's to insert mysteries into their games with 15 minutes of prep rather than several hours, because if so I th...

Monster of the Week is okay, as far as PbtA goes. It's inoffensive in tone and content. I don't recall it openly endorsing Nazism or rape, so that puts it ahead of some games.

PF2E says that the best person can lead the others in doing their stealth checks (This is a good idea!), the rules for doing so say that the players must be able to hear and speak with the person leading them (This is obviously incompatible with stealth, although if the wording allowed non-verbal c...

Apropos of nothing - Star Wars is the only major franchise where the "real true fans" haven't liked anything new since 1980. I think most franchises, especially those that are revived after a period of dormancy, suffer from infestations of Real True Fans. Look at Doctor Who, to pull an ex...

I'm tackling trying to make a working Call of Cthulhu game with actual working mechanics that doesn't use d% because d% is the bane of all existence. It's uh....slow going. I feel you. I'm half-heartedly working on what is effectively a fatsplat/setting hack for After Sundown that I'm tentatively c...

I see Gumshoe less as a playable system and more an essay on how to negotiate stories that depend on hidden information at a game table. In one of my most frustrating early RPG experiences, I had an MC attempt a mystery story. First, his implementation of looking for clues was "everyone rolls S...

I think there's a very big gulf between two of the classes of activities you're lumping under "Tactics." The guy who shows up to D&D expecting to play a skirmish wargame wants to optimize his Fireball blast radius coverage and get the most bang out of his action economy buck. He is cat...

Yesterday's Hero wrote:I pretty much have to wait for the Dungeon Master's Guide to do it since the game does not include NPC creation guidelines.

Wait wait wait. You're saying that the 640-goddamn-page shelfbreaker that is the PF2 book isn't even the complete game?

Would it make sense for a vampire based game to treat each of the various transformations with any enhancements as separate power chains? Something like this: Mist Power Basic: Mist Form As a Complex Action, spend 1 power point to turn into a cloud of fine mist occupying roughly 5x the volume of you...

A mist form ought to make you immune to some type of attacks (grappling, stake, crossbow bolt...) and allow you to sneak under doors. You can possibly balance bat and mist forms by making the former fly faster, but overall Mist Form seems better outside of long-range travel situation. Castlevania s...

I imagine that lancers rely on sloppy upgrades, fragmented computing resources and difficult to update hardware/software (especially if you need a new physical thing to load a new program) to find weaknesses in a corporate system. [...] As an aside: I like that this model can imply that opportuniti...

The Second Ethiopian-Italian War and the Abyssinian Crisis were the names of the events. The podcast that utterly failed to mention either was episode three of Hardcore History, subtitled The Organization of Peace. The episode with the 'encoded in DNA' thing was Episode Two, Guns and Horses. (I hop...

I'm very surprised no one has mentioned Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. His stuff is more like miniature audiobooks than what you would normally think of as podcasts. His series on the Mongol Empire and World War I are fantastic, as is his single-episode analysis of the atomic bomb. I also recommend ...

maglag wrote:the super advanced imperium

The what now?