The Gaming Den

From what I've heard the changes to the mechanics have been well received by fans of the franchise, as they're less clunky and work better than their predecessors. This isn't a high bar to clear, and V5 still has some ancestral jank (namely the disciplines) but it is a lot smoother. What fans are mo...

Yeah that. I think it can be an adventure in itself to trap, ambush an enemy in that way. Or you could just play and/or design a real class and not waste time on low-level Dumbass Melee Fighter Bullshit. I got kingdoms to save and demigods to kill, I do not have the narrative bandwidth for an adven...

It's not one to one but Ogre's scenario reminds me a little of Kingdom Death combat. There are a variety of optimal strategies players might gravitate towards. There are also monsters that punish those specific strategies. Range is very good, but also very hard to work with because bows limit your ...

There are some cases where Kiting the Ogre is perhaps optimal but not actually viable.For example the Ogre could have a higher base speed than the PCs, so while kiting a few rounds is possible, it could run one of them down in a round or so. Or maybe it has a few tricks like hurling rocks that punis...

I feel it's fundamentally flawed to look to mystery Novels as a guide for how to write Mystery Games. They're two very different mediums. And even mystery video games tend to lean heavily on the players object spamming and/or save scumming to brute force things when they can't figure out the puzzle....

I think that the only kind of realism worth talking about in the context of these games is actually not realism but just verisimilitude. People want to play in games that don't break their 'immersion' (immersion in this case being based on how they believe things 'should' work). This is sort of the...

Even rules light games sometimes track resources, they just tend to use pools of "resource points" instead of listing out each individual thing the player has. With small items of no huge significance not counting towards the pool. So you get something like "You have 10 supply, your t...

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea of being this defensive of making goblins as a whole evil capitalists when the clear and easy fix is to just make like, a specific culture who's evil capitalists and then just stock it with an assortment of races. But not it's got to be exclusively go...

I'm hoping it gets picked up by somewhere, the whole style makes me think of fosters home for imaginary friends circa 2005 deviant art. It's weirdly nostalgic for a new property.

Could pediepies crap just be because he's a Swede? My admittedly limited experience with Swedes was that they think racism is extremely funny. Like, I heard more racist jokes from swedes in one week than I did 30-ish years living in rural Virginia. It could be that people in Gothenburg are just sho...

I'd like to signal boost Innuendo Studios video "How to radicalize a normie" and NonCompete's "The Pewdie Pipeline" as good things to watch to stay informed on how fandoms and online communities get infected with nazi's over time, and what common presenting symptoms are.

From what I can tell linking to the macris boards tipped off a bunch of the denizens there that people were talking shit about them. And they decided to come say hi.

Unless he's just got an alert on his name like shitmuffin does, in which case he will need a similarly snazzy pseudonym.

I think prep time is going to vary from person to person and game to game as a rule. When I GM I do a rough outline of 'here there be plot hooks' and rely on random tables for the rest. There's even a random dungeon generator that only takes a couple minutes of cleanup to look presentable. And then ...

I don't know if I'd say kingdom death is "less hassle" than something like shadowrun. The base game comes in a 22lb 400 dollar box full of fiddly plastic assembly, cards, tokens, and dice. Expansions run from 60 to 150 extra. I think the point Brized was making was you can teach a board g...

I don't know if I'd say kingdom death is "less hassle" than something like shadowrun. The base game comes in a 22lb 400 dollar box full of fiddly plastic assembly, cards, tokens, and dice. Expansions run from 60 to 150 extra. I'd say kingdom death and its contemporaries are more like a bou...

This is a weird argument. RAW doesn't cause lazy writing, lazy writers cause lazy writing. Sure you could argue that as long as players are willing to buy and patch shoddily produced products we'll keep getting them, but that's like saying "as long as people keep eating mcdonalds no other rest...

Because even written games have bugs in them sometimes that render RAW either unplayable, broken, or unplayably broken. Say there's some class feature that allows you to make a move action whenever you miss with an attack. And then there's a feat added in a later splat that allows you to make a fre...

Because even written games have bugs in them sometimes that render RAW either unplayable, broken, or unplayably broken. Say there's some class feature that allows you to make a move action whenever you miss with an attack. And then there's a feat added in a later splat that allows you to make a free...

Darknet Diaries is one I would recommend. It's almost exclusively stories about hackers and the various things they've accomplished. My favorite episodes so far have to be about the professional penetration testers. People hired to break into secure locations in order to test security. Their methods...

If there are mechanical bonuses associated with picking the right traits, or even treating traits as an auto win in certain situations, adds a layer of social deduction/info gathering not currently incentivised by standard d20 social mechanics. If the DC to hit is 20, and I have 15 diplomacy, then t...

This is very close to something I thought of a long time ago, though instead of phrasing it as personality traits I phrased it in terms of preferred approaches. As in "This NPC responds positively to compliments and a bit of brown nosing, if you can figure out how to say the thing as nicely as ...

I think there are two distinct types of clues and I think that distinction is important for the purposes of a collaborative game. Information: Gossip, hearsay, history. The things you find written down or bribe a maid for. This is where you find things like 'Motive' or who's feuding with who, who mi...

I've just recently discovered an obscenely expensive board game called Kingdom Death that does something neat with it's monster encounters. Rather than have a dedicated GM, the monster your civilization hunts is controlled by the AI deck, a randomly selected pool of moves the monster uses on its tur...

Can you explain a little more about the unnecessary math? I'm not familiar with the Cypher system but I was under the impression that instead of "roll 1d20+mods" it was "roll 1d20 subtract mods from TN" which is functionally the same math just more THACO-y. But fans get upset if ...

The first season of Limetown is really good. It's an x-files esque conspiracy story delivered in the style of a public radio interview series. Definitely recommended. (The second season is kind of a shitshow; I gather that this is because the first season's writers focused on chasing a potential TV...