The Gaming Den

This link may help illustrate the mechanisms at work.

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The thing about oppositional demographics in the U.S. is that it's not X location vs Y location, it's primarily urban vs rural. As a result, the various factions are reasonably evenly distributed across the geography, which prevents the sort of unified zones of control you'd need for any actual brea...

On the Wong-Baker Pain Scale, where is stubbing your toe? For calibration purposes.



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FrankTrollman wrote:What I do not recall is whether the title had any reference or meaning in The Dying of the Light, a George R R Martin story from which the Githyanki were copied into AD&D by a young Charles Stross.

Wait, what?! Charlie Stross worked on AD&D?!

I'm sorry, I need to go sit down.

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I would suggest then, that for a TN of 3+ that the 'normal person' have a dice pool of 9 with extremely impressive but normal human stunts having a difficulty of 9 or 10. The normal person succeeds at Difficulty 9 on 2.6% of rolls and can't succeed at Difficulty 10. Total badasses with dicepools of...

I've spent a lot of time composing, deleting, and re-composing a message to reply to this thread, but it's been very difficult. I've spent years reading posts by many of you, and hearing about your experiences was hard for me. To everyone who has experienced loss, whether they discussed it in this t...

So there are a lot of things in play with how Flow points are expended and regained. The fact that they're limited at all is a nod, however insufficient, to the idea of non-reproducibility -- you can't lab-test your powers because eventually you will run out of points and not have an easy way to reg...

It's fine. Like I said, these are important issues that need to be discussed, and it's going to be tricky to nail a balance between "spending resources is fun" and "resources actually matter and reinforce the game's tone". Anything that helps get closer to that is always welcome....

In that specific case, why is that a thing: creating water? In the game where magic does stuff to alter probability and turn unknown situations toward your ends, why is instantaniousnly filling a container of any size that you verified as empty with a physical substance on theme? If you've ever rea...

To be clear, the concerns Hicks brings up are worth considering. It's definitely important that players should feel very strong and empowered to use Flow powers pretty freely, but not without limit -- the fact that you can eventually run out of mojo is meant to be a hindrance to your ability to eith...

Well, I think the math needs closer examination. For every Flow-using enemy you confront in combat, you'll gain Flow points about as fast as you spend them (if you spend 1 point per round and the enemy uses one power per round, you'll always be at parity). If there are multiple enemies using Flow, y...

So, real talk: is there a real downside to either not forming Claves with other doubters, or having the doubters split into 2 separate Claves? Not being in a Clave has a regular Humanity cost, as mentioned above. Doubters can be in multiple Claves, and Claves can interact, but this is a metagame fu...

FrankTrollman wrote:You can't have Hulk take a nuclear weapon to the face in one scene and then flinch from Daredevil's punch in another.

Daredevil feinted first.

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"Indirect".

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Champions and Feng Shui both have reasonably good descriptions of how to create adventures, but those games are literally series of setpiece encounters held together with genre tropes and mind caulk. Isn't this true of all modern RPGs? It could certainly be applied faithfully to most games we discu...

It was somewhat interesting to see characters in the new Dark Tower movie using powers verbatim out of the powers list I posted. I guess someone involved in the production of the film might be a fan of Doubt.

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In 3.X, Intimidate can be used to apply conditions to targets (like Shaken). I think that conditional operations could be used to some degree like this. For example, using Charm on someone would give them a Reluctant condition when attacking you and when defending against you, disincentivizing them ...

Weapons of the Gods (and its successor, Legends of the Wulin ) had a social system I liked, where successful social rolls (among other things) created various incentives, from bonuses for complying to penalties for defying, and even xp modifiers. So the persuadee was never hard compelled, but only ...

I'm of the opinion that if you would allow one PC to deliberately attack another, then you should allow social skills to work. If not, then not. Okay, sure. But how should that work, specifically? In other words, how can we codify the behaviors in such a way that they can't be ignored or weaseled o...

In generic terms, what should happen when a player uses Charm or Intimidate against another player? What should happen when an NPC uses these skills against a player?

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Fixed an incorrect interaction between bonuses/penalties and caps/boosts.

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Reading this over, it occurs to me that it's a real shame Sleepers aren't called Convicts instead, because non-Doubters could be seen as being trapped/imprisoned/obliviously in a world of their own convictions. This is actually very intentional. Sleepers are normal people who are blind to both the ...

Some of the skills have been updated in the main post. Social skills have been collapsed from five skills to three (Charm and Intimidate have been combined into Magnetism, Fast Talk and Oratory have been combined into Eloquence, and Empathy has been renamed to Insight). Additionally, some of the Pro...

Judging__Eagle wrote:Lots of good updates so far.

Thanks. I'm in the process of transcribing and formatting everything here into a pdf so we can start distributed playtesting and the search for artists.

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Added conditions and reworked damage into formalized damage tracks.

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