The Gaming Den

Having played 4th Edition again for a couple of months after spending several years playing 5E D&D, I have to say that if you want tactical positioning to matter, you absolutely have to use a grid. That said, you can make a strong case that tactical positioning mattered perhaps a bit too much in...

Even though i think PF2 is unplayable, three actions and a reaction seems like a solid foundation for action economy. I remain unconvinced the 3e action economy was the zenith of ttrpgs. PF2's action system is more complicated with no real payoff. Complete fungibility of actions when some of the av...

Hot take there, Lago. I'd like to see some science done on the effects of roleplaying and sexual... deviancy? Misconduct? I dunno, I just wonder if RPing out your fetish with a bunch of other sexually frustrated weirdos actually helps you not want to do more weird sex offense shit. I read Lago's co...

The reason was that at the Medium they had the SOMP (Sex Offender Management Program) and apparently some of the inmates in that program were using D&D to do… inappropriate role playing. The people that ran the program also didn’t feel D&D was healthy for those people in treatment because o...

I'm wondering at this point whether higher-power consumables should even purchasable. I'm on the fence about this for permanent magic items, but the more I think about it for limited-use magical items like Potions of Cure Critical Wounds the less I like it. Even beyond how consumables can have a wil...

You heard it right here folks. We already know the problems with bosses in systems like D&D. To recap: bosses get one action (plus that of subalterns) versus the party's. If you have PCs capable of busting out high amounts of damage or lockdown, the bosses are fucked. RPGs have tried all of thes...

What Frank said. You want them to matter so that positioning matters, but you don't want them to regularly trigger either. 4E D&D you had shit like Swordmages using up their Opportunity on Heavy Blade Opportunist AND Immediate Action Encounter Power several times a round and it was awful. 5E D&a...

deaddmwalking wrote:Since there are powerful incentives for EVERYONE to do it, the better option is probably to make it so NOBODY can do it.

And if you do this enough times and you get 4E D&D.

How did 'low is good' dominate grognard thought anyway? Is it just because Call of Cthulhu did it? People latched onto a bad Chainmail chart? What?

In addition to what Kaelik and Frank said, and what I said in another thread, the Drain system and how the mechanicas of spellcasting works with the rest of the system is very elegant. Not quite Euler's Identities elegant, but pretty close. Another thing I really like about Shadowrun spellcasting is...

So if you wanted to be a wizard, what would be the best short-term and long-term choice in terms of starting CharGen?

Why? Captain Hydra America is always protecting 'super racists', taking orders and following laws from 'super racists', it's a core part of the job. And, unless the player specifically wanted Captain America to show off their hypocrisy in the face of expedience, it shits on his and other party memb...

Even within the narrow concept of battle as there being a pile of hit points on each side reduced by a pile of damage from the other side, Let's step back for a bit: should that be the dominant paradigm of D&D? Shadowrun has a bunch of alternate win conditions and scenarios baked into battles. ...

The failed design behind Defenders and Leaders has been discussed, but have we talked about the failed design behind Controllers? The Controller role is defined by screwing up the DM's plans. Because 4E D&D revolves around its combat engine, this means action denial. Because 4E D&D has a sim...

Maybe everyone should have X amount of flaws (where X can be zero), assuming each flaw is more-or-less balanced? Not all flaws are equally disruptive to other players. If I'm playing a master planner type like Batman and one of my party members has a flaw of 'blabbermouth', my cheerios are thorough...

The problem I have with 'heroes need flaws' is that flaws only mean anything in context. Conan being a brooding, anti-social mass murderer who doesn't keep deals with anyone on his shitlist is not a flaw if you're playing Mad Max. Or Conan for that matter. It's a crippling disadvantage if you're pla...

It sounds like in every single one of those cases finding the vault is a binary thing, and you have to find the vault before you can continue on with the mission. Yes, narratively, finding the vault is binary. You either find it or you don't. In terms of game mechanics, though, why should the die r...

I guess the "suspicion" meter one fits with the skill challenge design, but the other ones would work fine in a non-skill challenge system that just happened to have suggestions for various events that could happen to move things along when the players failed. That's the thing -- they DON...

If you represent the heist as a skill challenge/montage where some of the actions fail (various players contribute skill checks etc), and they successfully make the "knowing the password", "hiding from the guards", "avoiding the alarms", and "getting the treasure ...

Fundamentally, I think these aren't problems that require a new and unique subsystem, so much as more careful class design (to give characters enough tools to contribute to most challenges) and more thoughtful challenge/scenario design (to ensure some of your problems are complicated enough not to ...

How does something like that happen (in a serious company with a product they want to get real money from)? I get maths being hard sometimes, but surely you'd want to test the thing as much as possible. The biggest problem is that the game designers were lazy. The failure of skill challenges is the...

This is not a route I would take for commercial success. However, it is a route you would inevitably take if you A) were aware of the problems of the previous edition, B) didn't know how or why the previous edition's game mechanics were successful (or even if they were) and C) didn't know how to de...

In genre yea a named dude can be befriended by the protagonist but if the plot of the story hinges on them getting into the good graces of named dude there is usually some trial or another they have to face. That's wrong. First of all, your conception of diplomacy sucks ass. I used the term 'dramat...

Calling your audience idiots for not understanding the genre in the same way as you is really... not a defense when you made an appeal to 'the people's' sensibilities. People want strategic outcomes that conflict with their priors and processes all of the time. And the more obvious the contradictio...

designed to be more viable to run without a DM. That means enemies have combat scripts they run off of, based on the proximity of PCs on the battle map and possibly random rolls. Still, this has apparently gotten some positive press at cons as a D&D competitor. lol. I mean, I'm not saying that ...