The Gaming Den

Introducing auto-success on nat 20s and auto-fail on nat 1s for skills causes all sorts of stupid outputs in all sorts of situations, and doesn't even have a benefit (if it was achievable the nat 20 would be a success, and if it was impossible to fail the nat 1 would still produce a success). There...

Fantasy Craft has some all over the place handling of size, but one thing I particularly liked was making carrying capacity/lifting/encumbrance scale with both size and strength, instead of just scaling strength with size. So a Strength 15 giant can lift more than a Strength 15 orc, but the accuracy...

1) A night's sleep, long rest, 6 8 hours (Wizard, Cleric, etc.) 2) A short rest, an hour (Warlocks) 3) A breather mid battle, takes a round or based on doing a smaller action (Book of 9 Swords) The hour-long short rest is a mistake that came out of 5e's early attempts to poorly court both 4e and OS...

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote: ↑

Mon Nov 22, 2021 11:05 pm

I think you could roll Rhythm, Twitchiness, and Anal Circumference into the same stat.

Either "Clenching" or "Pulsation".

I've been pretty happy with Scott Gearin's approach in his reworking of Fantasycraft or his (likely eternally unfinished) Alabaster project. He started by tracking everywhere an attribute modifier was used to divvy their system effectiveness equally, reworked skills to divide evenly between them and...

I’ve taken a look see at the preview materials for Level Up. Other than a few subsystems for the DM to tack on, it’s mostly player facing stuff: classes rewritten to have more decision points during character progression. There aren’t any math fixes or changes to the base system. So any DMs looking...

Oh, a particularly fun penalty one I recall from a campaign years ago: Specific perception failure : One of our characters was very specifically cursed to be unable to see drow, which was particularly fun because they were a very rare enemy type and disappeared from the pool of opponents for levels ...

Am I missing something? We've gone on a tangent from spotlight balance to a weird back and forth around whether mechanical design has any impact on the table's social contract to "the forum is dead." I'd kind of thought (as weird as it is to say it) PhoneLobster's point was the general con...

Clairvoyance/Clairaudience : on the limited but interesting side, being able to see/hear around corners, through doors, into sealed boxes and so on has lots of cute little ways to steal a moment. Playing dead : this one is a little specific and overlaps with the disguise idea, but being able to con...

Why not avoid the marking problem by just making progress one way? You can only move forward to new houses (maybe add some branching and reconnecting paths along the way). You could use a rondel mechanic or something to determine turn order, maybe set restrictions on how many kids can pile in on a h...

auto success sounds a lot like telling players the choices they made don't actually matter. I was under the impression that the whole idea here was for this to cover the things that already don't matter, or at least that have apparently been decided shouldn't matter. It does seem like the real goal...

How about the inverse? Alabaster has an abstracted "Wealth" mechanic and discrete currency. Wealth sets your lifestyle level, and you can bring it to bear against purchases every so often per adventure or week or whatever as a massive modifier to base price or haggle checks or something. T...

Am I missing anything? Price wars aren't really something I care to model, but I know how frustrating it can be to invest into crafting shit only to find out that you'll break even at best . Should I not even bother with this? An interesting solution I've seen to this problem is offering up loot an...

Does it need to be that complicated in the first place? I presume you generally are going to have a lower number of battles in your tabletop game than normally occur in a pokemon video game session. As a result, shouldn't you really be trying to work backwards from how common you want pokemon captur...

For a time I was actually The Egg. I still pretend to be a dude in some forums and things, it started as "you don't get harassed nearly as much" and sort of snowballed as you get used to people calling you bro (and not being quizzed on how many Sonic games you can actually name if you cal...

I think anything where the results are based on DM improvisation is doomed to feel like there is no agency. See Bearworld. That being said, "Yes, and..." is the rule of improv, and RPGs are a form of improv. That is why old-school DnD had so many tables. Tables were the original procedura...

Stubbazubba wrote:And when they try, it looks like this.

That is astonishingly bad. I'm kind of amazed a publisher released that, I've seen better advertisements for exploitative mobile games.

Yeah, Foxwarrior has it right. Ideally, the players have a broad enough palette of actions to be able to pick options that are surprising, and result in more interesting emergent situations. The better the rules, the more GM fun you can extract as you have to do less adjustment/adjudication to keep ...

5e casters have more restrictions and there are generally more counter measures (although the significant counter measures all involve magic). Overall action economy hurts 5e casters more, in the sense that there are fewer spells that can just 'win' an encounter against many enemies, so a PC wizard...

I'm not completely wed to the idea that you have to move the fun all the way down to the level of the resolution mechanic in order to have a good game at all, but it feels to me like if you were successful in doing so you could layer your other rules on top of that in a way that built off of that c...

I don't know that the resolution mechanic is actual the point we need to move down to for this kind of analysis. The D20 roll or whatever roll is just appending the phrase "...with an X% chance of success" to whatever actions players are attempting. There's some merit in evaluating where t...

Not knowing anything about Fantasy Craft beyond the Den review of it, are those a divine-magic-only thing, or are Paths a generic thing that everyone can use for things beyond Cleric Lite stuff? I think the latter option (whether it actually is that way in Fantasy Craft or not) would be a workable ...

I rather like Fantasy Craft's implementation here. Divine power is just a list of 5 abilities organized into domain-like themes called Paths. Classes that let you do divine stuff (or, just want to use the power delivery system) let you take a domain abilities, in order. Priests get more path steps i...

The more powerful skills are, the more you've written yourself into a weird hybrid level/point-buy system that you don't actually want. Has anyone bothered to make the case for why we want skills to be comparable with class features? It's the transitive property of mundanity. "Magic" is s...

The thing that perhaps bothers me the most about using DCs as your limitation is that every ability will come in at a 5-20% chance to succeed. So at the level when you get Hover, you can't actually use it for anything other than either: taking 20, or last ditch attempts where not hovering is a stra...