The Gaming Den

white people are better than everyone else at everything, including being slaves There's nothing Pseudo about you, Stupidity. Even a cursory analysis of my comments suggests that there would be far more obvious candidates for "best at everything" than Europeans. Imagine a society that has...

I'd also like to point out that suggesting Europeans have a greater intolerance for out-groups than other people is absurd when you consider history. Not that they don't have any intolerance, but they're much more tolerant than most peoples have been, especially in the modern era. I suspect "th...

Now, to be fair, Occluded Sun has contributed something very useful to the discussion - OgreBattle can use his posts as dialogue for the slavers, because they absolutely would discuss whether they could get more cold-tolerant or docile or lower-calorie-requirement slaves at this or another place, a...

I'd love to hear an analysis of new-Mage from someone with meaningful experience and a track record of quality posts. I look forward to your post with great interest. I do wonder whether Fate would be a good system for the sort of game that I'd like Mage to be - I'm not especially pleased with Evil ...

virgil wrote:racism

That word - I do not think it means what you think it means.

A lot of the Bible stories are simply lies - or made-up stories, if you think 'lies' is too loaded a term. The city of Jericho, for example, was destroyed long before the period in which Exodus is supposed to have occurred in. The ancient Jews didn't sack it at all. So there's no need to speculate a...

I'm just gonna conserve precious pixels and put deaddmwalking on Ignore. If you want any resolution to the issues he fails to understand, it's probably best if you research the topics yourselves - it's quite interesting and complex. To return to the original post: it's worth asking what qualities ma...

Africans were never extirpated as the North American or Australian natives were. The ultimate reason for that is that Europeans could never settle areas densely and push the natives out - and the reason for that is that they couldn't deal with the endemic diseases. The only parts of Africa with nota...

Are characters going to walk around describing their personal wealth in terms of Resource? No. But by the game rules, wealth is quantified to just that degree.

Because the game rules are abstractions for the players, not realities for the characters.

I found the morality in the Wonder Woman movie to be extremely muddled - they couldn't seem to make up their minds as to what they were preaching. Which may have been the point, since there were some similarities to what happened in the movie and some political positions I've come across more and mo...

Best slaves for what region? At least part of why the northern sections of the American colonies rejected slaves was that imported Africans tended to get sick and die rapidly there. They were favored in the more tropical southern areas because of their relative resistance to malaria. Europeans have ...

That's stupid. There's no reason characters wouldn't consider spells to have 'levels'. There's also no reason Mage characters wouldn't think there were different explicit levels of insight, although it's somewhat silly and ignores the various problems with making that system represent actual knowled...

Conjure Velemert Conjuration Level: 3 Casting Time: one action Range: 60 feet Components: V, S Duration: Concentration, up to one hour You summon 1d4+1 Velemert worth no more than one GP each. Choose two of the following for their properties: emit almond milk as a cooling spray quiver rapturously f...

More like finding typos and printing errors in a text. Except instead of text, it's the writers' understanding of what they're writing about. I'm not defending the setting, I'm condemning the writers. There are more than enough problems with the game, they didn't need to go about adding more. But, t...

I was rather put off by Dr. Strange when we're explicitly told that the titular character and the major NPC that objects to his style and methods must work together to defeat the great evil... and then Strange goes off and defeats it, completely and for all time, entirely by himself. There were lots...

No, it's more that the setting contains self-consistent and comprehensible principles that rule that out, and some idiot writers keep ignoring them. Rather the same way Star Trek deals with transporters. The setting exists the way it does because of established limitations to the technology, which i...

While just throwing actual money at a person can work in some circumstances, it'd tend to be grossly vulgar. The Syndicate is much smoother than that, using psychology to appeal to motivations and emotions. The nice bit about playing low-level Tech operatives is that you don't have to worry so much ...

I'm not sure why you think sphere dots don't exist in setting. Character refer to the spheres and their mastery levels all the damn time. What the fuck do you think they're talking about? Ah, the idiot writers strike again. WW had some real problems with them. No, the characters do not know about t...

The problem isn't so much that paradigm isn't rigorously defined. You can make a game work with mechanics that the players define. But they have to spend time discussing to actually define them, and that gets very tedious when every aspect of each character's worldview has to be understood. So peopl...

I imagine the deus ex machina at the end of the second is a way to avoid forcing the player to start over from the beginning if he didn't do everything in the right order, but having multiple tries to find the one true way doesn't make it any less jarring that there's only one true path (and nothin...

Well, no. Paradigms are technobabble bullshit by definition. If you have the right sphere dots, you can do whatever, regardless of paradigm and regardless of how much white wolfers jerk off to the concept. Well, no. Which is why they had to change the name of Spirit to 'Dimensional Science' for Tec...

Spirit can do just about anything, in the sense that it lets you contact spirits and persuade/compel them, and since spirits inhabit and control everything, striking the right bargain permits practically anything. The drawback is that you have to be able to intimidate a spirit, or be able to pay the...

The question you have yet to bring up, and which is absolutely necessary, is this: How much difference should level make? Should a level 10 character utterly outclass a level 1, or be only slightly superior? Should a level 10 character be able to do things a level 1 character has no chance at, or ar...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_(Harris_novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Spence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

Big-ass propellers (or jet engines, if you want to be less silly), and a gateway device that puts your ship 1% into a parallel dimension where those propellers can interact with something. Of course you can crank up the gateway field to increase acceleration, but then things start slipping through....