The Gaming Den

It's been over three months since I quit the message boards and stopped posting on social media. And I suppose some of you deserve an explanation for why I've revoked my name from endorsing this board as well as why I've canceled myself. This wasn't easy to write. It starts of course with the fact t...

First of all: the "Dirtbag Left" is not "the left" it is a vile group based on cruelty and stolen valor. Their way of doing things is to stake out completely unreasonable positions and give unforgivable insults to anyone who disagrees even mildly with them. The purpose is not to ...

I honestly think that if you want the bad old days of the DM trying to kill you, Dungeon Crawl Classics-style is great. You just have to get used to the fact that stats are 3d6 with no choosing which number goes into which stat, the only character customization is the one time you choose a class, a...

Camp followers and baggage trains are really important in many historical battles but don't make much of an appearance in most epic fantasy literature . As such, when Warhammer was young and more heavily influenced by historical wargaming, they tried to make camp followers and baggage trains be an i...

On the topic of what they are calling verisimilitude : the great unspoken assumption of RPGing is that the DM will not try to kill your characters. The problem with this being an unspoken assumption is that there are hordes of people who are full Dunning Krueger about permadeath and long-lasting an...

What exactly is going on with our case count that we have a local peak of new cases every Friday (save for Good Friday when the local peak was Thursday) and a valley every Monday? Some testing centers aren't open on the weekend and a lot of tests aren't reported the same day. So lots of tests are p...

In case people actually want to know about the tests, I can go into a bit more detail. The earliest tests are based on polymerase chain reaction. That is, there is a process that will multiply copies of a strand of nucleic acid an arbitrarily large number of times - but only if the strand in questio...

wait a second, how is this any different than a Druid or Ranger? The Warden exists because of 4th edition ideas about role protection. In that game, every group was supposed to want a tank character, a DPS character, a crowd control character, and a healer. The Ranger in 4th edition was defined as ...

Am I just stupid, or is the book just… not written in a way that a player new to the system is supposed to figure out except by intense fucking study? I did an in-depth review of this particular book Here . And my conclusions are much the same as yours. 5th edition Ars Magica reads like a web post ...

Not a rules rewrite, but me and radthemad4 did work together on a set of After Sundown icons for lokathor's gitbook that anyone is free to use if they want to put together an AS project. That's cool. Are there places and artifacts of spiritual power in After Sundown 2e? Like leylines, stonehenge, a...

I guess they weren't allowed to actually say "D&D supplement"? Since 2008, WotC has really clamped down on letting people use D&D brand identity. Of course, most of what you'd consider to be "Dungeons & Dragons" is not owned or even ownable by WotC or anyone else. Yo...

Why is SWEDEN so bad? O.o Never mind, i was provided an answer: https://satwcomic.com/balancing-act At the beginning of the pandemic, there were a lot of unknowns about how many people had the infection versus how many people were sick. If you used the most generous assumptions, it was possible tha...

I think it's pretty clear at this point that Trump is going to go down in history as one of the greatest butchers we've seen -- and if you don't count the lives of non-Americans, comfortably in 1st-place. If you do, he'll probably be a bit behind Truman, Nixon, and/or Reagan. The thing is, our inst...

I agree that "combat" against big nasty monsters expects and rewards a different tool set from "combat" performed in any area where normies could plausibly be nearby. Bringing down a warform Lycanthrope is a non-trivial task and benefits severely from the kinds of powers and weap...

Yeah, I'm so dumb for thinking the virus is fake. Prove to yourself it's real. Just try. Find the virus, find the statistics. They look like they are there, but they're not. It's all fake. But, you're all sucking on Satan's teet to hard to see it. I'm literally a doctor and we've had to move our wa...

OgreBattle wrote:Do any other countries have gun militia-types arming themselves to demand an end to quarantine

Venezuela. Although the armed militias have somewhat more complex demands.

-Username17

Trump knows, he just wont play into their hand, they want him to go to war with China over a fairy tale. I can't wait to hear how this is compatible with Trump publicly affirming he has a high degree of confidence in the "It came from a Chinese lab" theory. The sheer incompatibility of th...

Say you've got a ship in a fantasy setting (be it a ordinary sailing ship in a fantasy setting, a magic flying ship or a spaceship which usually is magic even if creators pretend otherwise), should you keep modern naval terminology? Should you say "port" and "starboard" cause it...

One of the things I definitely want to work with at least one other person on is the roles. Syndicates and Realms having troubleshooter teams allows and encourages the roles to be explicit and in-character. But there's a problem that the rolls in the source material are significantly different from ...

I'll be honest, even the condensed version of the Taninim just sounds like someone telling me about their self-insert MLP fanfic. I just genuinely cannot bring myself to give a shit. Subduing dragons and using them as mounts was in D&D from the beginning. Literally from the beginning because it'...

The Warlord is deeply tied up with the numerical undercarriage of the game. The character contributes primarily through boosting the actions of the other characters. The 4e Warlord was badly designed because the underlying math of 4e was bad. I don't know how a 5e Warlord could avoid falling into a ...

I'm calling May 10th as the day when the US surpasses the number of deaths of the rest of the world. No way. You're forgetting that the UK is also criminally negligent and the reported deaths are going to exceed Italy within the week. The US death toll is growing faster than the UK's but not by as ...

Robert Schwalb was working for WotC in the days of 3.5 and 4th edition. Back in 3.5 days, he did hack work with the proto-4e material like Tome of Magic. He is best known as the guy who wrote all the late period 4e DDI articles when everyone else couldn't be fucked to do their content creation jobs....

My own Technomancy for AS2 is: Technomancy Know Device Panopticon Wrath of the Gremlins - Advanced Craftsman Without Tools Physical Message Redline Rise of the Machines Which is the standard structure because elder powers are scooped off into a different chapter as players only really access them th...

Howard Hughes was the inspiration for the movie Citizen Kane. He was a megalomaniac who at one time had a grip on the American news comparable to like Rupert Murdock in 2003. Also he built himself a castle on California's Central Coast and is personally responsible for California's wild boar proble...