The Gaming Den

Rock Paper Shotgun interviews the new White Wolf CEO Almost nothing but "no comment yet" for any specific projects. Some talk about how the new White Wolf is relatively autonomous as a daughter company of Paradox. Does anyone know anything about this Martin Ericsson dude who's now "L...

It seems likely that any perceptions about the comparative ratios of excellent, distinctive games to bland games coming out of different regions is at least somewhat attributable to the denominator. That is, Eastern Europe produces fewer games, and of those games a smaller number still get worldwide...

2200 guards don't instagib an ancient blue dragon in 3.5 because it has DR 15/magic and none of their attacks can deal damage at all, even on a 20. I don't know how much DR a 5e dragon has.

Why do people feel the need, after literal years of silva's posts, to do this shit. Why do you need to go "Mmmmaha, yes, this behavior finally proves that silva's Really A Troll." C'mon.

If you're going to posit a finite inhabited space surrounded by an infinite uninhabited space, why are you bothering to include the infinite uninhabited space instead of just writing down that wherever is finite?

If your argument starts with the assumption that Sorceror is balanced with Wizard and concludes that being ahead or behind by a spell level is no big deal, something has badly derailed your train of thought.

Guess I'll start seriously considering some 7/10ths spellcasting PrCs!

I don't understand how it's possible for an effect to be coincidental to an omniscient observer because they can see your character perform whatever is necessary in their idiom to cast the spell, so they would presumably know "Ah, it may look like they got lucky with that taxicab, but I saw the...

So being in Stealth requires one roll per observer per sneaking character per round? If three PCs are trying to sneak past three guards, it's nine rolls per round until they get where they need to go?

It's not quite as ridiculous as that. It's just the idea that theoretically a designer could make a game which relied on Aristotelian physics, and presented it in sufficient detail and coherence in the game book itself that players could use it, without relying on a vague pointer to centuries of arg...

Concurring with jadagul, that's a really common convention.

The most common negation symbols I see used are ~ and ¬. I think ! for negation is used more often in programming.

Right. I was suggesting this as an alternative to ruemere's and 13A's systems, not a clarification or restatement, and looking for quick reactions to it. Thanks, Frank.

What if instead of tagging each pair of tokens with Adjacent, Near, Far, you had some graph of zones? Each player is in some zone, there's some adjacency relationship, and the relationships you care about are "in the same zone", "in two adjacent zones", and "in two non-adjac...

So 1.) It's impossible to kill someone without deliberately taking the "Murder" action. 2.) Heroes do not commit Murder, EVER, but sometimes in self-defense they kill. 3.) ???????????

Sometimes the Den will mention "asymmetric power gains", or stuff along those lines. Can someone explain exactly what that means, and what makes the kind of power gain referred to asymmetric?

Why do people care about making the tarrasque into a big threat anyway? What gives it so much cachet that people are troubled by its status as a fairly easily-killed monster?

Yeah, I can understand being skeptical because I configured the setup wrong so many times. No worries.

Where are you getting this requirement that there has to be a positive incentive to switch to the Nash equilibrium? Or that NE have to be the convergence points of iterated best-response play?

Because other strategies will have best-responses that are actually positive, which means that you will lose points when your opponent switches to them. I'll run through my process. For this two-player three-strategy game, a mixed strategy is a tuple (x, y, z) such that x, y, and z are real numbers ...

So you get zero points and he gets zero points. How is that supposed to prove it's not an NE? It's a zero-sum symmetric game, you'd expect the equilibrium to give both players EVs of zero. The fact that there are mixed strategies that have positive expected value when played against (1/3, 1/3, 1/3) ...

Oof. That's on me, I had the setup wrong. I gave rock 3 points, paper 2 points, and scissors 1 point. Sorry to keep flubbing it. With 3, 1, 2 the NE is (R, P, S) = (1/3, 1/2, 1/6). Let's check the pure payoffs: R = (-1)(1/2) + (3)(1/6) = 0; P = (1)(1/3) + (-2)(1/6) = 0; S = (-3)(1/3) + (2)(1/2) = 0....

Oh, I see what I've been doing differently. I didn't realize this was still zero-sum, and thought you only lost one point for losing no matter what you lost to. If it's zero-sum... Say your strategy is (R, P, S) = (1/6, 1/2, 1/3). Then an opponent's payoff for pure rock is (-2)(1/2) + (3)(1/3) = 0, ...

Well, hang on. If your opponent is playing R = 1/4, P = 1/2, S = 1/4, let's look at the expected payoffs of your pure strategies. The payoff for playing rock 100% of the time is (-1/2) + 3 * (1/4) = 1/4, for playing paper 100% of the time is 2(1/4) + -1(1/4) = 1/4, and for playing scissors 100% of t...

If I'm not getting this wrong, the only fully mixed Nash equilbrium is paper half the time, then rock and scissors a quarter each. Say player 1 plays rock with frequency x, scissors with frequency y, and paper with frequency z. Then the payoffs for player 2's pure strategies are: rock: -y + 3z paper...