The Gaming Den

Sure you can. Adding options can set up a prisoners dilemma. No, not even then. There are times when it is better to be irrational in certain problems, but that is not the same thing. Game theory gets really mind-melty the more you get into it. Take a scenario of a one round of forced cooperation f...

I'm sad about the non-political MPSIMS threads that are getting caught up in this. The "It's Personal" thread is a great part of the community and the only place certain users post anymore. It's probably the most positive thread on the site, with everyone being supportive of people they've...

That makes sense, but aren't these hex types also going to matter for other parts of the game? So you could have a swamp hex, which is poor farmland, difficult to move armies through, and carries a risk of disease. Improving it by filling the swamp will affect all of these, and will eventually resul...

Where are you getting DC 15 as the default? The craft skill has simple items at DC 5 and typical items at DC 10. Making them takes 8 hours/(DC*check result/item price in sp). Common meals cost 3sp per day, so even an untrained cook can make their own food in 2:40 a day by taking 10. Since that's com...

Arbitrary flight ceilings for everything doesn't feel great. I do like starting with spell ranges. Close range is throwing weapons, it generally doesn't matter much vs melee as it's within charge range. Medium range is the limit of direct fire. Bows can be relatively accurate at this distance. Long ...

When talking about how to improve a version of monopoly, I think Mario Kart Monopoly is an interesting game to look at. There are a few big changes. First, only one of the dice is numbered, the other is a powerup die that either boosts you or hits the other players. To account for the reduced moveme...

However, fbmh has already been brought into this, because Frank is using the rules to win arguments. If Kaelik and MGuy ignored Frank and posted in his clubhouse, Frank would be relying on fbmh to kick them out. To me, this suggests that the change in the rules that most respects fbmh's limited time...

Most people will spend real money, like actual "this is four hours of my life I took to earn this" kind of money, and buy things like a purple pair of boots that does nothing other than appear as purple boots on screen. That sort of thing is huge money in games now. Only thing beats it re...

I concur, but slam the door.

I'd be interested in a review of one of the various books of varient rules like Skills and Powers, Unearthed Arcana, or Pathfinder Unchained.

Also, PF core has hit 10 years, so a retrospective on what they were trying, and why they ended up where they did would be cool.

Thaluikhain wrote:

Ancient History wrote:and the Astral Plane (which warps the dimension we know as length [distance]

Oh, so that's how that works, never knew that. Wait, how does that work?

It's perfectly clear. It's just bigger than bigness itself. What could possibly be confusing about that?

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I could see geometric generation/linear advancement working for a game that has starting characters as non-adventurers/heroes who become heroes over the game. It heavily encourages starting characters to be spread out and not particularly good at anything but lets them specialize easily as the game ...

How about the Wizard's Hat/Tinfoil Hat defense? Antimagic Field is dangerous, but can be defeated with a bit of prep. You get a tall metal cone, big enough to stand in. Then you cast Shrink Item on it, turning it into a cloth cone which you wear as a hat. When you enter an AMF, it snaps back to full...

Toxicant is amazing. Until 14th level (so all game), you just give up one discovery for a poison that hits anyone who hits you without a weapon and can be applied to your own weapons as a swift. Starting at 6th level, the poison can daze anyone who fails the (easily-buffed) save, giving you a stunlo...

The problem with giving out feats as treasure is that you already get treasure as treasure. If feats are converted to treasure handed out by the GM, then they don't serve the purpose of "character option you pick out as you level up" and something else has to pick up the slack or else peo...

Pretty sure the RAW on retraining is that if you retroactively fail to qualify for a prestige class you already have, then you lose all the "features" of the prestige class. I can't remember if they specify what does and doesn't count as a "feature" or if you just have to guess ...

Does anyone have a link to the savage species authors saying that they were told to make the LAs unplayably high?

The majority of supers in Worm are one trick ponies, so there's definitely superhero fiction out there that works that way. I can't imagine a sane system for playing Worm in though. Like the protagonist can control all bugs in a 3-block radius, so she cares about things like how nice of a neighborh...

I liked 3.5 Dragonborn, but almost entirely due to the transformation. I wrote three backstories that hinged on it. One was an old wizard, long retired, who decided to undergo the ritual because it would make him young again, in exchange for having to fight evil. One was a former crusader who had be...

Even Frank can only remember a whooping two times he bothered using a non-spiked chain exotic weapon, one of those was in an homebrewed games where the exotic weapon was made martial so it wasn't even an exotic weapon anymore and the other was for the lulz since when was the last time it mattered w...

The Swordsage really isn't a swashbuckler. It seems to be a catch-all for all the not-quite-mundane and sneaky types. Its schools show this. It gets the blasty, throw some fire with your sword type of gish-flavored school, the meditative focus willpower school, the martial arts with throws and holds...

Remember that the Monster Manual 5 was the result of David Noonan being told explicitly that the fans didn't want the Monster Manual 5 to waste large amounts of page count on monsters with class levels, on irrelevancies like cave maps, or on long-winded tirades about monster gangs. Then the draft h...

I was reading through some OSSRs and I thought of some books that would make interesting reviews. First, 4e core. It would be interesting to look at exactly what they were trying to do and why that failed so badly. Second, ToB. The third of the Orcus books, and the only one to be successful. Third, ...