The Gaming Den

While it's partly a social problem, the rules do have a considerable impact, IME. Like - with the same group - we ran into this problem a lot more in 4E than in 3E or PF. And most of that was because of mechanical reasons: * Buffs or conditions that only last until the end of next turn, meaning that...

I've played Gloomhaven, and while it's fun it's not the model I'd want for a TTRPG. It is tightly balanced, but that balance depends on: * Actions are strictly constrained (as usual for a board game). * Constant time pressure, like taking a turn to pick up some gold could cause you to lose. * Balanc...

I like the idea of different classes have different resources systems, but in practice "You need to have X encounters per day if you want any balance" and "Recharge is based on purely metagame factors, if you go take a three month break in the middle of 'a plot' or 'a dungeon' then it...

Depends on what you're comparing it to. If a social action is like "an attack roll" then you roll and you get what you get. But on the other hand, if a social action is like "Get inside that palisade which is guarded by Gnoll mercenaries", then the approach does change the diffic...

I think that if you are going to do effect-based social rules, then the kind of abstraction proposed in the OP is the least jarring way to do it. Like, "It's easier to convince a rich guy to cut out his own liver than to give you 5 gp (because in a setting without organ transplants, that liver ...

Doesn't seem like there's any need for Planar Binding to have such a long casting time anyway. I assume the idea is that you need to have a trapped target, you can't just cast it in combat, but a 10-minute or even one minute time would be plenty for that.

I mean, does any elfgame have "interesting challenges to overcome in between battles"? If so, what do those challenges look like? Usually "here is some situation", players brainstorm a bit and come up with a plan (not necessarily complex), and then they execute it (probably just...

I dunno whether this kind of categorization really helps accurately inform design in the end, but it's fun, so: Builder / Solver is a valid axis I think, since they are to an extent opposed. Well, they don't have to be opposed, but most game sessions tend to be about some kind of threat/conflict, no...

I think you may need to convey these lycanthropes' philosophy more clearly, because to me it's unclear why "voluntarily take on a small curse, to yourself, from something that the artifact guarding group voluntarily gave you" is even bad, much less an instant-fail on the test. Now if it wa...

I'm weighing options between playing in two different Pathfinder 1e games, for which the goals are in pleasant opposition ... For the first one, is it Gestalt? It really should be to maximize the complexity. For both of those, here's some Spheres of Power stuff, since I've been looking at that rece...

I don't know. D&D has gone squigy. I'm almost positive that slapping the D&D name on non-RPG stuff, and RPG peripherals, and doing various partnerships like Rick and Morty and Stranger Things, is bringing in more money than actually selling rules books. It is. And that's why their current 5...

At least with hacking you can just decide it happens very fast - "pro-level hackers all use brain implants, so 6-18 seconds is typical." Things like walking a few blocks or even getting from one floor to another are glacial in combat terms. In fiction, it's solved by the other action havin...

I was thinking about how to emulate the pacing (people starting fights at their lowest power-state and ramping up over time, not using the strongest attacks at the start) seen in many anime, without meta mechanics. Here's what I ended up with: * Characters that are involved in this system have at le...

I mean, Wizards learning spells from finding scrolls / trading spells / looting spellbooks / sneaking into other Wizards' towers to copy from their spellbooks / etc. is a lot of fun, and in an ideal system all/most classes would have in-world ways to grow their capacities like that. But it does clas...

Speaking of which, do you know of any? I've been fantasizing about how I'd write one recently, but haven't bumped into much that already exists, at least not with organic growth that actually makes characters orders of magnitude more powerful over time. I haven't found one either, but I'd really li...

Do you want resource attrition to be a thing and the resting is disrupting that, or do you just want people continuing on more and resting less? Because in the latter case, you can do that easily by having few/no per-day resources. Like, if everyone is on ToB or Warlock style mechanics, and healing ...

They're still extremely broad and you'd probably want to sub-divide them, but I've always thought that: * Affect Self * Affect Others * Affect Environment Would be an interesting split. Obviously you'd have to calibrate things correctly - for example, an "Affect Others" killing curse shoul...

Also, people are going to want some choice of theme within a power schedule and vice-versa. So say five schedules, three choices of each, and a few oddballs - that's nearly 20.

They do seem to have some definite design goals, although they're never explicit about them, and of course don't execute them well. "You should always be rolling the dice. If a single thing you try to do is an auto-success or doesn't require a roll, something has gone wrong." seems to be a...

The more I read into Pathfinder 2, the more it reads like a video game. It seems like its made for official play only and nothing else, given the lack of flexibility with anything in there. "You can run pregen adventures straight by the book and nothing the players can do will ever force you t...

If you're willing to have your secret history far enough in the past, then you can hide the evidence of almost anything. Although at that point it's so disconnected from any human history that it might as well just be set on a different world.

One thing I notice - this is a very combat-oriented division of magic. If the game this is for only has combat magic, then fine, but otherwise you're likely to end up with the "one school (probably Blue in this case) ends up with everything besides combat" issue. For example, what color ge...

If you give someone eggs, flour, and sugar, they might be able to make a cake. I've met very few people who could probably do the same with a circuit board, let alone a full-blown computer. And that's today's tech, not 50 years from now. But if you gave someone carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, a...

The VPP change was a fairly big one in 6E, yes. The pool is based on real cost now rather than active, which brings in more in line with Multipower. While potentially exploitable, I think overall it's a change for the better - now a severely limited VPP like "Side Effect: Get Knocked The Fuck O...

I played one of the PF2 playtests, on the request of other group members, and the main feeling I got from it was "much complexity for little reward". Like, 3.x is overcomplicated, but at least it allows you to do amusingly crazy stuff, and there are benefits to "monsters work like PCs...