The Gaming Den

Which PBTA games are supposed to be good? I'm reasonably confident that Apocalypse World and Dungeon World each see more play individually than the rest combined, so if we're tossing out those two we're left stranded deep in the fucking woods of game design. But why not, let's indulge the train of ...

Which parts do you think are worth scavenging, and which games do it better? Earlier PBTA games were basically to forum-based play-by-post games what modern synthpop and cloud rap is to the music of the 80s. In PBTA's desire to break the mold of RPGs, they ended up creating something that pretty mu...

Not salvageable, only embraceable. If you try to sideline the quantum bears aspect instead of getting rid of it entirely, you end up with things like Pathfinder 2's skill system, where you spend half an hour optimizing your craft check modifier and then the DM spends five seconds deciding what your...

It is explicitly intended, by word of the rulebook itself, to skip directly to the challenge of putting clues together. It couldn't care less about anything outside of this insanely myopic focus, so yes, it's a bad mystery game. Really, you will find that almost every RPG product that outsells most ...

It's fun to go "If I did it...", so how would you have approached a 2nd edition of Pathfinder? Things that did need to be fixed, streamlining, and so on? "If I did it", I wouldn't have bothered with a 2nd edition of Pathfinder because it's a stupid idea. Pathfinder gained it's p...

5E has made it abundantly clear to any competitors that name recognition is what sells games. For industry-minded folk that just want to build a brand, that means either holding on for dear life to a recognizable license (i.e. Shadowrun/Vampire) or designing a game entirely around "D&D but ...

Well if we're going to operate under the broad assumption that any game which fails to live up to it's core premise is broken, literally every RPG I have ever encountered is broken. As far as the most obviously broken games I've encountered go: Pokemon Tabletop Adventures has literally no balance in...

While on the topic of caster and spellcaster level, I have to wonder--is there any reason that D&D's span of level's is as wide as it is? Do we need 20 levels for the full-fledged D&D experience? We have fights with martials, animals, and trash mob monsters with caster-like abilities at leve...

The execution and purpose of the knowledge is sound, it just suffers from a terrible name, like nearly every aspect of D&D does. While not specific to 3.5, a terminology rewrite would be one of the biggest things on my list for a 3.5 improvement--"caster level" should have a different...

Knowledge "Cultural" is a far better name for Knowledge "Local". A well-cultured character would be aware of the landmarks, restaurants and dynamics of most major cities and some smaller towns. "Local" doesn't tell you any of that, except when it logically applies to yo...

Random lurker here, but I'd like to thank you for your work on Splintered State. When I started looking into Shadowrun, (before I realized that 5e is an unsalvageable system) I was looking for guidance. Many of the adventures, including ones that were written for older editions, seemed to paint a pi...