The Gaming Den

Point of Order, Ma-Ti is an absurdly overpowered beastmaster/emotion controller who only appears weak because he's a good kid who isn't cynical enough to exploit his power to the fullest. In the alternate reality where is is cynical enough to exploit his power to the fullest, he solves all of his p...

Now that's just silly. If you have the tech for a bionic face, you have the tech to add some form of automatization that runs the "correct" behaviour for most situations with no need of manual triggers. The most advanced prosthetic limbs we have right now are made by hooking up sensors to...

Just because a leg is optimized on one parameter doesn't mean it's better on all others, and that matters a lot to what kind of choices people will make.

I dunno, I think it is perfectly legitimate for an RPG to decide it doesn't want to support online play. Of course, I also think it should actively make that decision rather than "accidentally" stumbling into letting players play a game in a trash way, and just tell them they need a client...

To be clear, I have no real objections to the use of necromancy for healing. I'm just actually genuinely surprised they made a sensible change. And I'm still going to object to calling "the resource we're using now that has nothing to do with spells per se but does power a variety of abilities,...

On one hand, I don't think Official Bitch Threads are that great, since they waste energy on negativity. And yes there is such a thing as too much negativity, even on the Gaming Den. On the other hand, Pathfinder 2 really warrants a drubbing, if just for our sanity, and everyone has clearly announce...

A Shadowrun-alike game that does not include Heat-tracking mechanics at least as nuanced as GTA is Dead On Arrival, yeah. It's always going to be somewhat MTP-ish, but not even having the courtesy of having tea-pouring advice is insulting.

So you live in the USA? No. Well yes now, but not what I was talking about. I came from Ukraine TO the USA. From my experience where I live people have a disproportionately negative view of their own country to the point, it gets somewhat sickening. I know that blind nationalism can be bad, but bli...

"Touch Defense that isn't Dodge" is really Deflection, as exemplified by the fact that the primary thing that adds to it without adding a Dodge bonus is a Deflection bonus, and the fact that we accept that "dodging" and "armor" add to the same thing just proves there is...

Shrieking Banshee wrote:From my personal experience, it's naive to think that governments inherently care more about people. In my country, the government ended up scaring away all investors through negligence, corruption, and instability.

So you live in the USA?

"Decriminalize prostitution, but criminalize every other aspect" sounds a lot like the so-called "Nordic model" which has a tendency of maintaining the undesirable effect of driving sex work underground. Only a tiny sliver of locations, like Denmark, have pursued actual decrimina...

To me, it seems that the story of Seven Samurai, while you wouldn't tell exactly that story in an era where the Clans are strong and societal order is maintained, would be a low level story in such a game, where bandits (who are mostly hardened killers and mostly have military training) are fended o...

I would basically assume that a Dire Bear or whatever is built off of the Brute chassis, but that they would probably not be taking full advantage of all the abilities that would be available to an Xth level character because they're a fucking animal, not a human intelligence. They would have just e...

The monsters do have power schedules, but they need to have painfully simple ones because they're multiclasses and juggling two fiddly power schedules is largely not acceptable Regarding Ravager, I am not sure what you mean by Channeling, you mean the thing where they dump actions now for damage lat...

I'm totally down with low-level PCs being the lowest of the low all ratcatcher style, but by the time you're a Knight of Whatever, nevermind the Queen of Wherever, you are too important to buckle on your own armor and are at the beginning of ceasing to care about resource management.

Probably the first step would be to understat and underspecify monsters relative to the PCs, which I was vaguely pretty sure was going to be the case with e.g. monster classes being essentially "secondary" classes for what a PC would have, unless I misunderstood that bit.

Oh, I see. I always interpret D&D as intended to be primarily Weird Fiction rather than "medieval fantasy" unless overly specified otherwise because there are in fact spacemen in our fantasy "Oriental Adventures" (e.g. illithids in the Underdark), so just embracing "sure...

I never really hewed to the "other races must be super different" thing, since they all need to be sapient bipedal humanoids (or able to manipulate things as a sapient bipedal humanoid can) anyway. Feels like extra makeup on a rubber forehead alien to me. Why? Sapient, sure, but that does...

Oh, I get that, obviously, I'm just saying that even within, say, the Sanders camp, there's enough of a contest of meaning that I feel very hesitant to use it. But, this is supposed to be about non-political news that makes you cry. Or laugh, but really... So, non-politics. But because I am feeling ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_level Could be a useful article.

A good thing to note, maybe: Wizardry made in 1980, based on D&D (Men & Magic was printed in 1974), went to Japan and inspired Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy a few years later.

"Democratic socialism" contains two intensely hotly contested definitions such that I would hesitate to use it to actually describe anything except the immediate result of a revolution sparked by a time traveler leaving a copy of the Communist Manifesto lying around Ancient Athens (transla...

Correct! And yeah, Timmy/Spike/Johnny/Vorthos at least make predictions on "what sells a card?" which is critical. "Some X% of the playerbase is Timmy, some Y% is Johnny, some Z% is Spike, and some V% is Vorthos, how many cards does satisfying each require and how much in sales will w...

OgreBattle, I think Bartle's examination of player psychology in MUs is way more relevant to gaming than GNS theory ever will be. I know that's outside of your purview as it is not tabletop, but you could mention it as part of branching the course from tabletop into the rest of the video game design...

Honestly I'm inclined to agree with the thesis that oral history could okayishly-accurately record some pretty far-flung histories, as long as you can keep people reciting the repetitive, mnemonic storyline over and over, just, we abandoned that technology when a much better tech came up: the abilit...

My experience was with Blades of the Dark, and for me, the wording on the abilities was actually quite satisfactory (but wording on equipment wasn't, when equipment was important, so that was a problem). I think actually having a "level 1" character sheet that then gets discarded by advanc...