The Gaming Den

There was a shooting at an open-carry thing in the states, maybe last year, and the police said it was impossible to do anything at all because fucking everyone had guns and were all running away at the same time, and the people open-carrying said the same thing, you couldn't tell who the shooter wa...

The 2010's had me suffer from 10 years of ageing. Fortunately, did not die from it. Widely under-rated, is aging. Same happened to me, and am hoping for the same again in the 2020's. Avoided a few 4e games, acted as a sounding post for people's complaints about the 4e games they played in. Read a w...

2nd edition Chaotic Neutral. Where, on coming to a bridge, a CN character might just swim across the river instead, because Zeb Cook was a horrible person who hated classic free thinkers. People would play characters and try to think up inanely stupid ways to respond to any fucking stimulus whatsoev...

5e monsters are giant sacks of HP compared to 3.x And weren't 3e monsters also giant sacks of HP, compared to 1e/2e monsters? Well. I have studied this particular topic. Most 3e monsters weren't, Dragons and Giants were, when compared to what PC damage output could do. Gygax in OD&D set up figh...

Yup, should've said in there somewhere, just using the attack dice to save a roll, only way to get enough pushes going at early levels, and it lets everyone play the positioning game rather than just the specialists. I feel like this is the sort of thing 4e was trying to be, at least in the marketin...

OK. So. I think this is the basics that can work. NB: Very pro-melee, because I'm very pro-melee. -- What's this doing? Bloodbowl is a game of manipulating tackle zones. Pushing, tripping, or harming opponents enough, and placing yourself as you do it so you're not in the way of team-mates, or are s...

TV and movie studios are owned by billionaires. They are almost always extremely in favour of every aspect of the real world status-quo. Even when the status-quo became that the state tortures people in gulags due to guilt by association, that just means the next hero will torture people in gulags d...

Blood Bowl movement in D&D might work, you know. Free trip on anyone who leaves your threatened area, with some sort of simple single-dice mechanic.that just ends their movement if the trip works. Not attacks, or maybe something modest associated with the falling down, just so avoiding folk is a...

Yeah, I mean obviously, like, he was gunna nationalise the Lithium mines, and uh, the US has pretences about making batteries out of that stuff to do basically everything with, so no, there has been a fascist coup. Term limits, lol. Too many y'all are supporting a fascist coup. Don't do that. You kn...

If you were designing a 3e classplosion hack with tiered classes, what would be the ideal levels to divide the playspace into? (Throwing out all the old classes) I was thinking probably 1-6, 6-12, and then 13-20. That way it lines up with vancian casting. But would 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20 be better...

Dunedin for the hotel, there's a couple groups keep turning up and offering to build the city a massive 5-star hotel, if only the city would fund most of it. But, the only place you can really build one is on a row of blocks just under the green belt that runs across the surrounding hills, and that ...

There's China, they've done lots about climate change, but they're sadly rather passive on the international scene. Or, you know, not sadly, but unfortunately? There's a word there somewhere for when someone's doing the right thing for complicated reasons and it's not helping. -- Meanwhile, my local...

Paizo mostly sells their own stuff, rather than on Amazon. I mean, it's a strictly better deal to buy the books from Paizo, you get a free pdf with them there and only there. Pazio also mostly has their own message boards. Like, there's reasons WotC/D&D sells a lot of stuff on Amazon and also ha...

From what I've read of Gygax running oldschool things during the 3e era, it was easy enough to beat his adventure material if you had enough 3e experience. Basically, he'd describe a scene and as long as you understood which skill to use in the 3e play of that scene, you could just say your characte...

Being able to do more than one thing in a round is good. It is for instance super important that you can move and attack in a game involving melee combat, because you might want to do melee at some point instead of just always chasing things. Being able to do three things on your turn is however not...

A reporter asked "Is there anything on your mind that the president can do now to make any of this better?" O'Rourke responded "What do you think? You know the shit he's been saying. He's been calling Mexican immigrants racists and criminals. I don't know, like, members of the press, ...

I recall people used to complain about 3.0's giant table of things that provoke an AoO, not because it wasn't also listed in the relevant parts of the text, just that it was huge and people neither like nor expect to take AoO when they try to do interesting things beyond constantly face-stabbing the...

3.0 D&D was good simply because it was focused on a specific thing that the players of the time wanted to play, and ran a serious playtest for a couple of years as they fiddled with things to get it working. It's the later changes to things that were clunky, they were still fixing problems and a...

There was a history to Afghanistan before the Russians went in. Like, at some point that many thousands of years of history and events and wars and dying empires drew in the Soviet Union and it became a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union. And there is a much shorter history to ...

How do you think proxy wars work, other than by one big country militarily supporting one side and another big country militarily supporting the other? Like, In Afghanistan in the 80's, that was a proxy war between the Soviet Union and the United States, because the US gave some weapons to the rebel...

You can't use relativistic physics in a game, because relativistic physics is a graduate course at university. Bollocks, fucking trauma medicine's a longer course at university and beyond, and we face-stab people in almost every game that exists. Because you make a game-approximation that sort of w...

The Saudis are opposed to Iran, Yemen is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. It's also very close to Saudi Arabia, and so they are dropping a lot of bombs on it, with refuelling and targeting support from the United States of America, which congress and senate voted to stop, and Trump vetoed,...

Inflation is directly controlled by the central bank's interest rates, because that largely controls how much money is rolling around in society at any particular time. There's limits on that simple process because the rate can get to zero and there are other factors pushing it, but there's ways aro...

I disagree with maglag in that bandwidth can be limited to whatever you want, D&D explicitly limits such crap to 20 y/n questions or 30 words for instance. And stories with phones can be equally as chilling as stories without, getting calls from someone in trouble that you can't actually help is...

So, that's mostly new player groups exploring the game, or something for your kid that's cheaper than the set if they're interested. What's the buy-though on that, what proportion of the $20 people get into the game enough for something like the $200 core rules giftset or expansion books beyond that...