The Gaming Den

I'm not going to explain why, IRL, efficiently reducing the amount of opponents you're fighting is, in almost all situations, better than not doing that . Can you explain to me a common situation where that would not be beneficial? You made an assertion. The burden of proof is on you to back it up....

owlassociate wrote:Realistically, spreading your attacks between multiple oppponents is kind of a bad tactical choice.

Oh? Based on what? And why does it matter if we're talking about game design, where a player choice that's always good makes all other options for that choice into trap options?

It'll get complicated with more than just 1v1. A double attack can be optimal when ganging up on someone who already spent all their combat dice, or when you have super good combat skill and know that you have a chance to land 2 attacks or definitely 1 even when splitting dice. Unless there's some b...

For the sake of speed of play and fun, maybe max offense should beat max defense at least 30% of the time with equal opponents? Some research on this: https://www.pokerstrategy.com/news/world-of-poker/Why-you-have-to-let-weaker-players-win-occassionally_101770/ Slight tangent, but this is also likel...

Having no downtime for leveling can be setting-breaking, or it can fit. See "Strategies of Advancement" in http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=35813

This is partially what I had in mind - you can fuck off and do downtime stuff for a while if you want, but it still carries a cost or requirement of some kind. Even if you're just hanging out in town, unless you're a homesteader who owns property then you probably require a certain amount of money ...

It would take a bunch of iterations to get right, but downtime as a resource to gain power can work if there's a secondary required resource: Leveling up: X days training and : Meeting XP requirements. Researching monster weaknesses, rituals, non-core spells, item blueprints, etc.: X days researchin...

I've found that having narrower types of magic with more depth in how you can use it makes it easier to keep the setting sane. For example, instead of elemental magic, just pyromancy as a single school with various applications of moving and concentrating heat. A good talk by Brandon Sanderson on ma...

So I think the 'feel' of real time Castlevania can be carried over in a tabletop game where enemy 'tells' can be learned, this can be a passive effect like D&D's "dodge giant technique", or a choice effect like "DM tells the dragon hunter player the giant dragon skull tower will ...

For me, it's a love of TTRPGs and a knowing they can be better. Tough love. TTRPGs sit at around 3-4% of the total hobby games market: https://icv2.com/images/article_thumbs/650x650_36e1bf357ad8a1f1baafd96f5081831382cccb8ab123d60ed23c634d.jpg Report https://icv2.com/images/article_thumbs/650x650_d18...

How in hell do I explain to them, in a short and convenient way, that it's not about how complex or simple the rule system is, but rather about more ephemeral things like actual rules to interact with the world outside of combat, interesting decision points, and the ability to drive narratives in a...

I did Bones 1-3 and still haven't painted any. I think I'll just buy pre-painted minis from now on.

Yeah, that tool definitely isn't perfect, but it gives a ballpark. If it reduces uncertainty, it's useful.

BTW, anyone know what sort of sales #2000 in books on Amazon means? There's a calculator for that - https://www.tckpublishing.com/amazon-book-sales-calculator/ The P2 core rulebook has a BSR of 2,532 right now. That means roughly 1330 sales per month. The special edition book is rank 52,469, for an...

Unless the people who answer surveys about their GM prep are people who enjoy prepping to GM. Which seems very likely. Why speculate when there's evidence? The 2016 Sly Flourish DM Survey[/url]]Of 6,600 respondents on primary adventures used, 64% answered personal adventures and 36% answered publis...

APs already exist. If you want your prep time to be thirty minutes, it can be. You can even run an AP out of the book with no prep at all and it'll still kind of work. If APs were sufficient in their current state, the data would have come out very differently. The only games I've GM'd for the past...

And how long does it take to prep for a TTRPG session as a GM? http://s3.amazonaws.com/slyflourish_content/2016_survey_images/2016_survey_preparation_time.svg Source: The 2016 Sly Flourish DM Survey For over 90% of DMs, there is no tradeoff in hassle between rules and setup vs. a modern cooperative ...

For the portion of the TTRPG audience that cares about good rules, a significant chunk moved onto alternatives: MMORPGs and cooperative board games like Descent, Gloomhaven, Kingdom Death, etc. Those games offer players some or most of the fun of a TTRPG with less hassle. In MMORPGs, computers handl...

So the basic idea is the PC's can fight well as individuals, but against boss threats they must voltron their actions together to bypass high defenses, nullify "it will kill you in one hit" actions, and so on. Figuring out what the "deathblow" of a boss monster is and what actio...

How do you plan to keep track of the NPC's plans/goals, beliefs, and who has wronged them? How would the players get access to this information? How could it be presented in a way one could reference in less than a minute?

The Call of Cthulhu campaign Masks of Nyarlathotep includes deliberate red herring locations. These often led to encounters with 1-2 PC fatalities. My players hated those. They also red herring'd themselves in paranoia over whether NPCs were actual cultists, people knowingly hired by cultists, or pe...

So, the PCs have to work together to preserve the Masquerade out of self-interest, even if they are different types of monster. Either as an ad-hoc thing in between doing other things, or as their full time job. You're only a few steps away from playing Vampire: The 40k Deathwatch Kill-Team...ing. ...

From Googling "constraints in creativity": https://www.fastcompany.com/3067925/how-constraints-force-your-brain-to-be-more-creative https://medium.com/stanford-d-school/want-some-creativity-crank-up-the-constraints-5728a988a635 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/3147732.pdf http://www.iso-cel...

The Lazy DM framework is pretty good for building adventures in general. But if we're just talking about narrative structure for an adventure: For TTRPGs, the framework I've found that most translates from screenwriting is the four-corner opposition structure from John Truby's The Anatomy of Story ....

Godzilla's top speed is 300mph (ditto with the faster kaiju from Pacific Rim), so 2640 feet per 6 seconds. Walking speed is probably like 660 feet per 6 seconds. For PCs fighting kaiju, in a straight combat you need at least one scaled-up grid to at least 100x so you can depict a kaiju-scale battle...