The Gaming Den

Howard Hughes was the inspiration for the movie Citizen Kane. He was a megalomaniac who at one time had a grip on the American news comparable to like Rupert Murdock in 2003. Also he built himself a castle on California's Central Coast and is personally responsible for California's wild boar proble...

I associate the name Ray Winninger with superhero games. Specifically the DC Heroes RPG from the '80s.

Ekoh and Narsus? That's some pretty weak name-borrowing from Echo and Narcissus.

Out of curiosity I pulled up my one 5E character (level 10) and tried to figure out how long it would have taken our party to whittle through 820 hp (plus 20/round regeneration). Probably forever, unless there are some juicy magic items in the adventure path that help streamline the process.

If this is really a level 1-20 adventure, it seems odd that the PCs have killed most of the gods in the campaign world and it's just past the halfway point!

How many HP does Lutheria have, by the way?

What genre are you looking for? "Action movie" mundane or "soap opera" mundane? Or something else entirely?

Libertad wrote:*hey, that’s a Roman term!

Same goes for Volkan. And Kentimane is a cod-Latin translation of Hekatoncheires.

The biggest problem is being predictable and limited with how much downtime you get. If the players are completely in control of downtime, they may well go "yeah, let's spend the next twenty years crafting some sweet gear before we go to take on the big boss", and at that point you've com...

Being fair, however, dnd skill systems didn't apply to "real world stuff" even back in 3E. I mean, unless all adults were level 8+ commoners, dnd-land is a world where people fucks up three out of four times at everything they try (DC 15 being the default) A level 1 NPC with 4 ranks in a ...

I'm not sure I understand the question. It's trivially easy to write a TTRPG where magic sucks, so I don't believe magic is always overpowered. But if you're defining "magic" as "the ability to do overpowered stuff", then the statement is tautologically true.

A close second with how the classplosion failed is because 4E D&D characters are BORING. The powers are small-scale '[3W] + a slide 1' shit, classes get their powers and big upgrades at the same schedule, soforth. My main complaint was that playing my character was boring. At first I thought it...

In 3.5 "Unearthed Arcana" there was a alternative rule set that made spell slots have a recharge time. I had a lot of fun the two campaigns that used this variant. That being said, it's a drastic increase in bookkeeping, even if the result is not worrying about daily limits. You become ex...

The "choose an attack and a defense then simultaneously reveal" martial arts system is what was used in the original "Top Secret" spy RPG. (If I recall correctly, "Rabbit Puch" was pretty awesome if it didn't get the appropriate block.)

I'm always a bit mystified when I read an old module and it says "something interesting happens if the PCs throw valuable stuff into this random hole". I mean, that's a surprisingly common thing to have in an old module. Why is that a thing? Is it so that you can easily identify which play...

It's trivial to come up with a spell point system where that doesn't happen. For instance, you could come up with a system where level 1 spells cost 1 point, level 2 spells cost 2 points, level 3 spells cost 4 points and level 4 spells cost 8 points and a 7th level wizard has 15 spell points. If yo...

So, people who are arguing that spell points don't cause people to just trade away their lower level spells for a few extra castings of their best spells know that they are not just theoretically wrong but emperically wrong as well right? It's trivial to come up with a spell point system where that...

If all combatants are super-fast, then you can get by with having big hexes/squares. It's more game-stopping if one combatant is super-fast and the other isn't (which I discovered through the Heightened Speed power in Villains & Vigilantes).

When 3.0 came out, I liked the idea of being able to differentiate one Big Dumb Fighter from another. E.g. if Fighter #1 has Weapon Focus (bow) and Fighter #2 has Power Attack, that makes them "feel" different even if they're practically identical otherwise. The big flaw with feats is the ...

Moving on, I think that the main issue with adding this as a subsystem is that it generates a lot of book keeping. I think the main problem is that it suffers from a fallacy along the lines of: "if something is interesting when it happens once in a blue moon, then it's 30 times as interesting ...

We had the "Batman vs. Hulk" comic when I was a kid. It was pretty goofy, but kind of fun.

https://13thdimension.com/the-len-wein- ... -the-hulk/

Vancian magic... I feel it makes more 'sense' if you've actually spent some time physically creating talisman strips, vials, etc. that are then physically manipulated to activate. And you can only make those strips and vials exactly once every 24 hours because...they all require a specific flower t...

I haven't found spell points vs. spell slots* to be any different in terms of "nova-ing"; if you're using spell slots, you're just "nova-ing" your high level spell slots instead of generic spell points. What I dislike are X/day abilities. The start-stop-start-stop style of gamepl...

There is a real difference between D&D 3rd Edition's chasm and Risus's chasm: the time the number is pulled out of the MC's ass. Specifically, in 3e D&D, the number is pulled out of the ass before the player decides to try to jump across, while in Risus the number is asspulled afterwards. T...

Reading this discussion of comic book "physics" is like listening to people argue about whether there is an anvil that is big enough to flatten Bugs Bunny like an accordion but small enough to merely raise a bump on Daffy Duck's head.