The Gaming Den

1186133446[/unixtime]]Titan quest is awesome, and a refreshing take on the fantasy genre. [br][br]Except for the part where the game math was devised by a lifetime resident of an asylum, sure. (Or possibly that was just the person who tried to describe them in the manual, I haven't reverse-engineer...

It's Cramped Outside?

And when it's time to bypass enemies without combat, some characters might want to get good intelligence through scouting and simply avoid potential enemies, while another player might bargain enemies into friends, and yet a third character might lead an army of monsters around that fights it out w...

Updated the [counturl=78]rules[/counturl] with a bunch of warding techniques, some basic advice on skill point distribution for new characters, and numerous minor changes.

Any luck with the random combats, rapanui?

If everyone gets a Social rank and the Socialist just gets more, then everyone can still contribute during a talking situation. Everyone can help the Craftsman make his crafting rolls, and everyone can help the Spy make his Spot rolls. This would allow the whole party to contribute in something nor...

If the goal of that manifesto was actually to forewarn readers of the issues in that particular system, then the writing (and particularly the title) is considerably worse even than it first appeared.[br][br]There may occasionally be a need to remind players that it doesn't make sense to complain ab...

1185403622[/unixtime]]If you want a system with two rolls made on basically the same scale you either need to have no margin of success issues on either roll or you need to do what I think Frank suggested on one of his four stat threads or something and have the same contribution to margin of succe...

Created some [counturl=82]sample characters[/counturl], which may or may not be helpful for you.[br][br]There's one of each of the 3 callings created so far, though the casters are a bit myopic on account of only 2 schools of magic having any techniques so far.[br][br]Note that they're designed to b...

So, I did a little number crunching to ballpark the hit rates and expected damage for low-level attacks and spells.[br][br]It's difficult to get an accurate picture, because there's a lot of variables, and a lot depends on individual builds, tactics, and synergies. But I think I'll want to change th...

Also, when and if you write up social/profession/knowledge skills, don't have them compete with skill points with combat skills. All characters should be competent in combat and outside of it, so keep these things as separate as possible. [br][br]Yeah, I saw some previous discussion about that idea...

1. Is someone penalized for attempting to resist several spells, like they are when attempting to evade various attacks? If not, then it may change optimum party composition to benefit multi-fighter parties. Particularly multi-ranged attacker parties. [br][br]Currently, no, they're not. That's part...

If you mean "when can you recover from peril?", that's described in Recovery: Peril (p. 18)[br][br] Any character may erase her entire accumulated peril by taking time to relax and regain her composure. This requires that she do nothing (no movement or combat action) and remain off-guard f...

Peril-healing could indeed be balanced, and does make a reasonable amount of story-sense, though doing it by making peril-fueled attacks on your allies does not make sense (at least not in my mind).[br][br]But the main reason I don't want to include either is that the buildup of peril is supposed to...

If there is one notably fuzzy part of the combat rules, that would be it.[br][br]Peril is mostly restricted to doing bad things to the targeted character, but I still don't want allies to be able to use it up for some ineffective bad thing before enemies get the chance to do some effective bad thing...

So what do "ART, WIL, and SPR" actually do?[br][br]When I'm defending against a melee attack, I can choose to use DEX and spend my entire bonus against the first roll my opponent makes? [br][br]Making an attack requires that you make two rolls:[br]Finesse: DEX + finesse skill vs. target's...

I've been doing some work on my own homebrew system, tentatively named "Perilous," and I think it's far enough along that I need more experienced people to laugh at it and tell me why it's hopelessly unplayable.[br][br][br]This seems like a generally good forum for that sort of thing, so h...

So, getting back to the original numerics question...why do we care about the number of elements being an odd prime? And if your attack power in an element isn't necessarily the same as your defense in that element, how does any of the analysis done up to this point have any bearing at all?[br][br]B...

1183857444[/unixtime]]At the same time, there's more reason to have a multi-stat system than defensive and offensive specialization (or generalization vs. specialization). Strawberry/Chocolate attacks damn' well better taste different from Potato/Steak attacks [br][br]If you want to have more flavo...

1183847417[/unixtime]]If one person goes 6/0/0, another person can be 2/5/0. You can run the numbers on that at your leisure.[br][br]So no, you can't play jiggery pokery with stat costs on a trinary system and have it come out evenly. It always eventually comes down to RPS. [br][br]Yes, if you have...

On a side note, this was probably apparent, but you can give a trinary system (or higher) this type of balance by doing sneaky things to the stat costs.[br][br]For example, say that, in addition to the 3 main stats, each character also has a universal "stat maximum" that applies to all thr...

1183794496[/unixtime]]As stated above, the right method of attack stat combination keeps certain (power of two) stat arrays balanced. Other arrays will never be innately balanced narrow vs. broad. [br][br]I don't see what this has to do with powers of 2. You could have 6 stats and use 3 in every at...

And, proceding logically, if you had 4 points to distribute between red, blue, yellow, and green, then the player who specializes has an even greater advantage over the player who generalizes (+3 vs. +1, compared to +2 vs. +1 in the trinary case).[br][br][br][br]OK, so I am now understanding that:[b...

OK, so what am I missing about a 4-stat system that means that you're trading +1/-1 rather than trading a +3 to one stat vs. -1 to each of three other stats?[br][br]Are we assuming that bonus-trading cannot be done any more finely than +one half/-one half? Or perhaps that the 4 stats are grouped int...

1112921731[/unixtime]]There's a whole set of math about how things which have only two as a factor are balanced as choices and things which have any other factor are not. [br][br]Could someone explain this in more detail, or cite sources for this math?[br][br]"Balance" is used to refer to...