The Gaming Den

If the status quo is kept by a single NPC, then it means that the status-quo falls out of the window as soon as that NPC dies. Since PCs often have the ability to kill people, you end up with these NPCs getting all kinds of ridiculous buffs and fuck-you powers just to make sure they aren't killed. S...

Just noticed that Donald's lawyer is "Castor Jr".
"Castor Juniors" is the French translation for Disney's "Junior Woodchucks".

There are dwarves in Shadowrun and tp me they serve the purpose of the "well-integrated race": "Why can't they all be like the dwarves? Dwarves are fun, they drink beer and make jokes (and even when they don't, you can make a lot of funny jokes about them) and they don't take up much ...

The rule changes sound good. My main problem with Vampire is that it was never clear what the game was about. It had all this edgelord presentation, went on about how it was about loss of humanity and how terrible it was, then it had pages and pages of superpowers and finally it had you play powerle...

I haven't played Chrono Cross but I feel your pain. A bad work that could have been good (because it had talented people working on it, good foundations to build upon, good ideas/concepts, etc.) is worse than a plain bad work. And it's even worse when there's a cult around it. I still have a hard ti...

My choice of words was bad. The international observers I had in mind was the OSCE criticizing Trump's interventions, which is different from fraud, I'll fix that.

- Armed people threatening citizen trying to vote against the regime. - A few days after the elections both main candidates say they're winning. - International observers calling out fraud the behavior of the president. - Current leader barricading himself in the presidential palace. Well, after all...

While miscasts that outright kill the spellcaster and the party aren't funny or interesting, miscasts that put them in a worse situation are, in my opinion, okay in a "high-risk/high-reward" approach (where magic will either solve the problem or make it worse) and a more or less slapstick ...

There are a few other things I think can be useful for some social systems: - Social protection: just like the mage can often protect the party with counterspelling, or the hacker protect the team's network, the social character should be able to protect the team from persuasion attempts. And this s...

We don't use the "dark ages" term in French but there's still a tendency to view the whole medieval era as an era of stagnation where you wouldn't want to live. As for the Roman Empire, the portrayal is a bit ambivalent. It's both seen as a "civilized/advanced culture" and as the...

Just two additional points for the discussion: 1. Persuasion is rarely something instantaneous. Influencing someone is something you do over a long period of time, which rarely fits your needs in a RPG. 2. Characters in RPG often have talents that go beyond human abilities. Even the dumb melee fight...

It can help to restrict the scope of your social system. In some games, there are only a few social situations that are relevant to the PC's interests. There might also be a "tone" you expect. If you play dashing swordspersons, your social system should mostly be about using witty retorts ...

I think it's important to know what "genre" of investigative fiction you're looking for.
Hard-boiled investigations, police procedurals and Agatha Christie's books all have different approaches to investigation.

I see two distinct concerns in this: 1. Making the mechanics more interesting. I don't know enough about D&D to judge, but my experience with fights in low-level Earthdawn was that you just spammed the same move over and over, hoping to get 2 good rolls in a row so that you could move forward. 2...

Shadowrun 4e: Can you toggle adept powers? If yes, where is it explained? I don't think you can, though in some cases the adept can probably decide not to use them (I think that killing hands specifically mentions it, but it probably applies to other powers. I think that an adept with missile maste...

One day you just glance over and realize they've been just casually carrying around a shipping container worth of heavy metal armaments and 12,000 balls of string and enough furniture for a small palace in their 3 pages of individual small print entry 3 column wide inventory list.... So what? What ...

I don't really see what an encumbrance system bring to a game. (Unless your players love micromanagement) If it limits the amount of gear you can carry, it means forcing players to focus on the same "optimal" gear and leaving aside other stuff that could be fun to play with. If it limits t...

I outlined a kind of narrative system as well where players can spend meta points to make things they earn in game a permanent part of their character. NPC contacts, castles, etc. I think many games would benefit from having this handled by XP. After all, if gear/contacts/castles/etc. make your cha...

Our culture has this strange fascination for "good" people solving problems with force: how many movies are about a "good guy" solving problems with a gun? We also have a fixation on heroes, with helpless masses needing big heroes to save them. Both of these are problematic but t...

Is fail-forward supposed to be saying "yes" to every single thing the players attempt, or is it supposed to be looking at a larger picture. In the locked door scenario, the goal is to get into the room. Whether that happens by picking the lock or not is ultimately irrelevant. I have two p...

The thing is, players don't feel like they lost agency when they get hit by a monster who beat the character's AC. Bad things can happen to PCs that they don't control and its OK. I'm fine if my character gets hit by a monster who beat his AC, but I'm not fine if it becomes: "You take a step b...

Oh looks nice! Does it require mouse look or is it playable with classic doom controls?

Imagine failing a roll to unlock a lock, but rather than just failing, you roll on a failed lockpicking chart and get the result "Pick breaks loudly, alerting anyone inside that the door was tampered with. They investigate." So the PCs lose the chance for surprise, but the game continues ...

I've been thinking about that random narrative concept recently. I think there's a difficult trade-off between player agency, random narrative (and, less importantly GM agency). Having the story go in a completely unexpected way because of a failure can lead to something interesting. However, there ...

Has the response from red commie European socialists been noticeably better than the USA's? Like the Viking countries, Germany, France, what are they up to In France we've had confirmation that we should have stayed red commie socialists instead of destroying our public services, especially public ...