The Gaming Den

Dragons This is almost its own mini book, so I will break down sections by sections. We start with some stuff on their age catagories, and all dragons of the same age are the same size. This is probably an improvement as its easier to track. They also age at the same rate. Again same deal. What isn...

Nah, if they wanted to get females (I assume you meant human females) hooked then the D&D manuals would focus on sex and relationships. And there would be various lurid descriptions of sexual acts through out. Basically they need to make the game about hooking up with vampires and other superna...

Gx1080 wrote:iminatuion

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Wait, "raelizm" is your objection? Not, "This is nowhere near as cool and epic as it should be!"? I think it is less realism and more verisimilitude. A halfling jumping in the air and slicing a colossal giant's throat with a magic dagger is in no way realistic, but it is much ea...

Don't, don't, don't break up monsters by body part and treat each body part as a separate monster. That has worked in exactly one place ever and that place was the first seven Final Fantasy games. Chrono Trigger? As the title suggests, I'm trying to figure out how to go about hacking 3.x to make fi...

As a separate issue, rules are empowering even if Mister Cavern isn't a dick. If the rules say I can do something then I can. If they say I can't I can't. If they don't address the issue then it depends on whether Mister Cavern thinks it is a reasonable thing for me to do. This means that my charac...

Monster roles might well be handy for creating a bunch of monsters in a hurry (though why not just test the first hundred monsters and then copy them?). But in play? That's all but useless. The Hobgoblin "Leader" has to point to the other Hobgoblins it's found with anyway, and generally b...

if you knock over a vase. But... what determines whether you knock over a vase or not? There are no fucking rules for that. It's just, if the DM decides that you knock over a vase and give your position away, that's tough shit. If you have a DM who acts like this, he's a bad DM, and the players won...

I believe you are confusing two different threads. But, yes, NGE is the one I was calling shit. You can tell because I paired it with the entirely deplorable School Days. While I pared Attack on Titan with the really very engaging and interesting Trinity Blood. Which, by the way, is like a much mor...

I will point out that there is one difference between Dragonball and Naruto which matters to a certain percentage of the population-- the art style. Some people will prefer one (Naruto*) over the other (Dragonball*) (*disclaimer: this is my personal opinion, and while I think it is the correct one,...

I prefer roll+keep to "Dice Pools as seen in Shadowrun and White Wolf Games", particularly on rolls where the actual number matters, not just Pass/Fail. Because each extra die does something for the XP you invested, even just a 1, as opposed to having a 2/3 (or more or less based on what ...

@ Lago & Drolyt: All that you are describing is a conscious decision to engage in a particular gaming style. And in the middle of it, you tenuously suggest a shift of the baseline point at which the arms race begins. Nothing's changed. That's not at all what I'm saying. I'm fine with the idea t...

@ deanruel87 Adding additional simple functionality, while not necessarily game-breaking, does indeed let you do things above and beyond what your base character expectations would allow. If the game assumes itself to be functional and balanced without magic items, then it further assumes that char...

Speaking as one who played several VPP mages in HERO, you want at least a -3 modifier on your pool (focus, somatic, incantations, requires a skil (to activate)) so you can have at least three and preferably four or more powers running simultaneously, and always have a cosmic pool with a RSR to swit...

First of all, I want that the player don't need anything, be it a helm of underwater action or a +1 sword. If they are supposed to fight incorporeal creatures, they should have class abilities allowing that. The whole game should be functional and balanced without any magic item. You do realize tha...

50 Point Pool, 52 Point Control Please tell me these are transposed, and the VPP cost is 52(pool)+8(control:25/3, rounded down)=60. I otherwise wouldn't mind a bit of hand holding. Er, yes, I switched them for some reason. Fixed now. VPP control cost often gets a lot higher than the pool costs. The...

Slightly tangential to the topic: if someone conversant with both Hero and M&M wouldn't mind, could they please perhaps share an example or two of situations more effectively modeled in the former? If it's necessary to remain germane then one might consider the advantages of a VPP as compared t...

Well, it certainly limits what you can do. You can do more with open-ended spells like major image than you can do with purely defined spells like fireball or web. Open ended doesn't mean no rules. The D&D illusion spells are somewhat poorly written, but that isn't a fundamental limitation. It ...

If you require everything to be written out, then you're limited to playing a board/computer game, where you have a finite action set, and trying anything beyond that results in the game engine telling you that you can't do that. Did you just miss the discussion on HERO System? There might be thing...

If part of the system is literally "have some guidelines, make the final effect up yourself and ask the GM if it's cool" and you consider that a valuable attribute... then Ars Magica or Ritual Path Magic is as good as you're going to get. How could you possibly consider that a valuable at...

I guess some people could interpret the guidelines provided differently, and since I'm the GM, I usually win such arguments. I know Frank already tackled this one, but wow. You basically negated the entire rest of your post with that one sentence. I have never played Ars Magica so I can't really sa...

Okay, so HERO is like I thought the first time around. The complaints are that it has a lot of pieces and... no damage types? Or just that you can theoretically take three levels of Fighter and call yourself a necromancer even though you don't do necromancing? [hr] I'm not sure what you mean. HERO ...

If it's just fucking M&M, what's the rest of the fucking book? I accept that M&M is something that people who like comics like, but I don't read any and I can't grasp how the physics work and I basically have no clue what anything means as a result and it feels arbitrary and pointless.[/ran...

We can, however, tell you that Samurai were not so fond of their swords when they were actual warriors, because bows are a better weapon and emphasising your swordsmanship meant downplaying your bow skill. Source please. I am aware that Samurai were trained to use bows, particularly while riding a ...

They never really thought of themselves as honorable per se (loved guns, trickery, burning shit down, treachery, the works). Its only in the 1700's when the samurai become lazy people who aren't allowed to get any other jobs that you get all this noble bright katana bullshit. Your Japanese history ...