The Gaming Den

Having run a low-level game using Tome feats, Tome of Prowess skills, and primary caster PCs (cleric and wizard), there was definitely a problem where player options increased at a pace beyond what my players were happy keeping track of. Everyone at the table was smart and wrote software for their d...

When characters are sneaking in a combat situation, how does your system handle the problem of needing to track the undetected/detected/located for (number of sneaking characters) × (number of perceiving characters) character-character interactions? The extreme example is something like a bunch of n...

Going by the 10-minute version, Holmes is a Tome Fighter who murmurs "Discombobulate" whenever he uses Foil Action (and spams it every chance he gets).

On the flip side from getting the science right, have you looked at any period SF for inspiration? You could do worse than mining Star Man's Son (aka Daybreak: 2250 AD ) or similar to see how pop culture in the 50s envisioned their world after a hypothetical nuclear armageddon. (There's a wide spect...

Another possible source of inspiration is The Stuff of Legend . The fundamental thing driving character action there is rescuing the boy (from the bogeyman in the closet), and dramatic tension also comes from characters confronting past misdeeds or dealing with feelings they've kept hidden. It might...

Does burning wheel do much with party members acting to support each other? What I’ve seen of it was focused on 1 on 1 dueling. Burning Wheel has a few different combat resolution systems. The two that you probably care about are: Fight: a very detailed combat resolution system that is mostly prese...

Another important aspect of balance is narrative agency. If a psyker character's action outcomes are "enemies all explode into a fine mist" or "nothing happens," then you can set probabilities so that a psyker who attempts to do their thing once a round has the same expected time...

Since we're on the subject, can anyone else confirm or refute that Timothy Zahn's Conquerors' trilogy would make for a good miniseries? I've had a soft spot for it, but it ain't quite high literature, and I've never discussed it with someone else who has actually read it. It also has issues with wea...

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. This sounds a lot like how that turning in Risk cards to get armies works: each time...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_movement

Overloading the sense of "manifold" in "the ethical manifold" leads to a invocation of GSV Ethics Gradient (which appears to presuppose some underlying manifold on which the gradient is defined).

I played a fun homebrew heist one-shot that was basically a tacked-together version of the old D6 system and a "reveal how you actually planned for this" mechanic. Play proceeds as usual, but when the party runs up against an obstacle that is going to ruin the heist, a party member can go ...

My heartbreaker notes never advanced to the point of a fully fleshed out system. A friend did take these concepts and produce a system out of their own take on them, which I quite liked, but it wound up falling well outside of heartbreaker territory. I started with the principles that player charact...

Some friends and I have done a little bit of design for a heartbreaker-ish system, and one thing that came out of that was the notion that questions like "wears a floppy hat or an armored helmet?" should be defined with reference to your game's setting. You can start with a set of more abs...

As in life, so online: I lurk at the community's periphery. No clue how many of us there are. I would be very surprised if there were enough of us to account for tens of thousands of views, though.

A more efficient approach, of course, would be to rip it up and start again. Yep. This is a problem. Narritively, you want to the party to consist of a Solar (Luke), A Lunar (Leia), A Sidreal (Obi-Wan), and a couple of dragonblooded (Han and Chewie). But this isn't a party you can put together, in ...

FWIW, if this setting really doesn't have general-purpose computers running software as a thing, I imagine that people don't really use the world "computer" the way we do . It might be that a "computer" is a "dumb smart device" that has very flexible behavior but no rea...

Is the premise of "Software is dead" based on any real world trends? I really like the idea of nintendo cartridges for hacker stuff with the decker-deck aesthetic. In a cyberpunk future 50 years from today, it's difficult to say what computing will really be like. Disposable optical CPUs ...

I think I understand what Frank is getting at. For example, in the climactic hack at the end of Neuromancer , in which Case becomes one with the Kuang Grade Mark Eleven virus and achieves the apex of his art, he is sitting somewhere in orbit around Earth. If you want someone to be able to do that, w...

The amount of time travel meaningfully possible within the solar system with instantaneous communication is unlikely to do much. In the spirit of using RAW to try to break a setting: A rocket takes off from Earth orbit and fires its drive until it reaches a relative velocity of 0.0005c with Earth. ...

I also thought this had fallen by the wayside, but I had high hopes while it was still going. Throwing something more onto the idea-pile: today, in 2019, it's clear that, in a future like the one posited by Asymmetric Threat, it will be trivial to generate internally consistent, photo-realistic audi...

It's a short story, and it's worth the (very brief) read. it is not hard to find the text online.

I have found that starting with a religion's social purpose leads to a better feel than starting with a mechanical one. You can start with a premise like "Cult that trains up necromancers and will raise an army of the dead once there's enough of them," but that leaves open the need to defi...

The Eternal sound really similar to the T'lan Imass. Is there some common mythological theme that both draw from? I suppose that this could just be a case of similar-looking fantasy set pieces. After all, "Army of undead" is a longstanding fantasy roleplaying trope, and there are multiple ...

A friend tried to run this for us last year. It was nice of him to do so, and I suspect some of us had fun. He obtained a 3.x conversion of the module from somewhere and had us put together level 10 character builds using the 3.5 SRD only, with a pocket veto for shenanigans like wish chaining or spe...