The Gaming Den

For Sharply-Tiered Skills, Something that's Average difficulty (50% chance) for someone is Very Difficult/Near Impossible (5-15% chance) for someone who is one level below to do and Very Easy (85-95% chance) for someone one above. That is not how dice pools work. If you want a system where adding o...

This is one of those ideas that sounds really neat and realistic/immersive but in practice leads only to massive stupidity. The bottom line is, unless your players are magically 100% oblivious to all meta-gaming concerns, you need rewards that incentivize the things you want players to do. If you wa...

But the actual fact of the matter is that 85% of the time, the ability has no effect, and the other 15% of the time, it does, so the ability is actually worth 15% of the attack it's boosting. Actually, it's worth 15% of the difference between the effects of a hit and a miss on the attack it's boost...

Swordslinger: "This halves your miss chance, IF your miss chance was exactly 30% and under no other circumstances ever." Doom: "Halving your miss chance might be really good, depending on what your miss chance was! " If you cannot see the problem with your remark, you are beyond ...

When you normally hit on a 7 or better, then hitting on a 4 or better is certainly significant. Almost half your misses are now hits. :facepalm: Seriously? "Half your misses are now hits, if you were already not missing much"? This is the caliber of analysis you use as ammunition in a deb...

First paragraph of Hide & Seek says the base time is determined by the hider's roll, but the second paragraph and table say it's based on the area being searched. I'm guessing that both of those things are supposed to affect the time somehow. You may also want rules for how much information the ...

Keeping Things Quiet ... These sorts of things can backfire spectacularly. If the character fails to get 2 hits, their shortfall is actually applied as a reduction in the threshold of future investigators. If you just yoink the tax records of the people you are trying to make vanish, it actually ma...

Thing I notice looking through the text files. World of Darkness has a neat property where it is both the name of the game and the name of the world to be used as a comparison point with our own. So you can have sentences like "People living in the World of Darkness blah blah blah ." &quo...

A mechanic where the support characters give more options to the lead character but do not take any actions themselves (other than changing order) does not sound to me like it makes the support characters more involved.

Yes, but another goal of the system was to cut peasants off from getting weird results like 'successfully forage for food in Pandemonium' or 'casually intimidate Titans'. Reducing the TN will reduce the number of dice you need to get a result, but won't it admit more mooks into getting 'awesome' re...

If you don't have serious concerns about people using up all your bandwidth, an argument can be made that wireless encryption isn't worth it. But I usually try to err on the secure side.

To connect my DS, I had to go to the Nintendo support site to get a bunch of magic numbers (specific to my router brand) to enter into my DS in order to get it to connect. I also had to change the wireless encryption from WPA to WEP, which isn't very secure. I also had to figure out that DQ9 only le...

I still don't agree that the chance for character death should be essentially zero It depends what you mean by "essentially," of course. A better way of saying this might be that most people have incredibly bad intuitions for statistics, and therefore what seems to them like a reasonable ...

Shazbot79 wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote: RPGs have to generate a feeling of risk without generating the actuality of risk.

Could you elaborate on this idea a bit more?

Suggested Reading

Ultimately, RPGs are fraud, because of the Elennsar problem. And yet you claim that you are aware of this fact, and also that you like RPGs. So obviously there is no requirement to genuinely convince the players. Even if there were a complexity floor, that doesn't change the fact that there is also...

Sure. Final Fantasy XI. You have a job, and you have a sub-job. And if you take a subjob that uses mana, you get bonus mana and if you take a subjob that uses on of the other resource management systems, then you use that on top of whatever you do with your main job. Interesting; I've never looked ...

It's obviously not a requirement for multiclassing though. Almost every game that has multiclassing also has multiple resource management schemes. Using a universal resource system and a standardized power accumulation system both make design easier, and they make multiclassing more easier. But nei...

While it stands to reason that having a resource management system would require every character type to get abilities in a similar fashion in order to work with it, that's just blatantly not true. In a mana system, you could have a fire mage who burned though mana four times as fast to throw hellb...

Oh, and in DQ9 I finally managed to unlock Armamentalist. Haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Is there a way in-game to determine elemental weakness other than trial and error? I am missing a scan spell in this game pretty hardcore. The in game bestiary tells you. No, it does not. The in-game b...

My instinct would be a combination of #2 and #5. Each combatant "engages" a single enemy; "engagement" is mutual and exclusive, so if you engage Bob, that prevents your allies from engaging Bob, and also prevents any other enemies from engaging you. (It strains believability, but...

There are tons of quests during the game where you need to kill an enemy with something that does ridiculously small amounts of damage (I think the Ranger unlock quest Arioch was complaining about is one of them). What's this attack that does damage but is guaranteed not to kill the target? As far a...

Keep in mind that the person who erects the wizard's ward doesn't need to do all the damage to the slime, just the killing blow. For the scarewolves, I don't think the person scaring them needs to do the killing blow, but I think you need to kill them while they are still scared . As in, before they...

The quests in DQ9 give the distinct impression of being written by someone who hates the playerbase. "OK, you need to kill this monster. But you need to do it using this specific tactic that has been chosen because it is amazingly tedious and ineffective and you would never in a million years c...

Thinking about it, the halting oracle is a bad example; I'm studying for an algorithms test right now, and my default reaction for anything is to reduce it to a known problem (in this case, "Where is the nearest piece of paper with the answer to the following question: does the following funct...

Comparably, Innumermancy can change the number of guns a mook is carrying to zero, Dowsing and Clairvoyance give you a constant-time halting oracle (which might as well give you infinite computational resources), Timing lets you dodge any attack you know about, and Permanence probably makes you and...