The Gaming Den

It also irks me that while even Ep 4 has four different fighters and by Ep 6 it's seven, now we're back down to two. Because we all love X-Wings and TIE Fighters. This has always struck me as particularly dumb. Toys sell. Toys are the single most profitable thing in Star Wars and have made more mov...

Most of the Sanders>Clinton people are very liberal, highly engaged, likely voters. When the general election rolls around and they realize just what level of insanity the Republican nominee is proposing I suspect they'll shut their mouths, hold their noses, and vote for Clinton. The various candida...

But no one has made a game where people play super-hero level characters in a fantasy world that isn't shit. Has anyone even made a fantasy world with superhero level characters that isn't shit? I mean, Japan rolls out three or four such worlds each anime season and almost all of them breakdown in ...

and there are no rules for what the rotes actually do Technically using an 'established' rote is supposed to reduce the difficulty of the effect by one, at least in Revised. Of course, the actual system for establishing that difficulty was so baroque most people just defaulted to highest sphere + 3...

In some sense, by Revised, MtA was actually 2 games, Mage and Technocracy, and speaking as someone who ran both on multiple occasions, Technocracy was by far the better game even though it used nominally the same rules. In particular, it was way easier for players to understand. The amount of cognit...

Having 'Ben Solo' is dumb for one simple reason: Ben Skywalker exists. De-canonization didn't suddenly make the pre-existing EU disappear into the ether. It's all still out there, and aside from a tiny 'Legends' label to hide behind much of it is still in print. You can absolutely order any of the 2...

Significantly A New Hope has - in addition to a number of key scenes of puppy-kicking by the Imperials - several expository moments regarding the politics. There's the one where an officer questions Vader about the implications of holding Leia, there's several exchanges between Leia and Vader or Tar...

Disney wanting to wipe the slate clean is not only understandable but I don't see how they could begin to go in their own direction if they didn't. The really annoying part is not that they wiped the slate clean post-RotJ, but that they wiped the slate clean pre-RotJ as well. It was really annoying...

They want the sorta crazy star wars fan boy following that star wars used to have. They want that core of fanatics promoting their movies and buying their merchandise. They want those guys to get out there on the internet reminding us of god damn star wars twenty four seven until the next movie com...

Additionally, while Bernie would absolutely 'push for' a progressive agenda while in office, because of the Republican stranglehold on the House, none of it would get passed. None, zero, nada, significant legislation from a Democrat president, whether Hillary, Bernie, or Jesus Christ himself is not ...

Onyx Path's concept of 'demand' is 'enough people to throw money at a kickstarter sufficient to pretend to pay freelancers next to nothing, to really, really slowly develop layout, and to conduct the operating expenses of one guy .' The capital expenses and operating costs are so low that a few hund...

3e could have been a vastly simpler game, but their research showed that what people who buy RPG books want is options that they pick through to find the good ones. That's why you have feats with prerequisite chains and shit, people pay money for it. There's an interesting paradox here, one that's ...

One of the big reasons that Vampire has historically been more successful than the other lines is because it doesn't actually claim to have all the fucking answers and thus avoids insulting people's intelligence quite so often. Vampire also had the advantage in that it simply didn't need to explain...

No. Effort into a character is not zero-sum. Bad roleplayers are just going to play badly. And that's okay. Roleplaying games aren't for everyone, and some people get off on the mechanical challenge and should be playing Warcraft or, hell if I know, ME3 multiplayer or something. The traits, though,...

The point I was making is that there are huge issues trying to integrate the fluff to answer even the most basic issues of What do the terms Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage mean in a one World of Darkness. Yes the Werewold Triad is dumb, but you could potentially use it to meld Werewolf and Mage into on...

Only a player can make a character "interesting" or "boring," qualities which are completely unrelated to how effective a character's build is Not related to efficacy true, but they are related to effort,and the amount of effort a player puts toward a character is to some degree...

It is also that min/maxing in 3e/PF often fails to produce characters who are interesting, or have any weaknesses at all - or at least weaknesses that will actually impact the gameplay in some significant way. In fact, it tends to produce characters who have incredibly strange idiosyncratic lifepath...

Particularly if the Democrats don't secure Congress; she's better-equipped at both inter-party negotiation and legal fu. The thing is, there is essentially zero chance that the democrats will secure the House of Representatives. The Republican gerrymandering advantage is far too strong for that to ...

Issues like the Generation mechanic are minor compared to the far broader issue of attempting to create a new One world of Darkness where the three main groups play together while appeasing hardcore fans who have decades of experience functioning in a universe where they explicitly don't, on a mecha...

Mundane skills are kind of a low-level concept. It feels like the rogue's Open Locks % only matters the first few levels. Hercules and Rand Al'Thor and Harry Dresden don't really give a fuck about a locked door. Why have a complicated subsystem for something that's not even going to matter after le...

Internet (social media) wise I only see stories/memes about Trump and Bernie. It is important not to overestimate the power and reach of social media, especially in the context of primary elections - which skew older. Only around 60% of Americans are even active on Facebook (and that counts everyon...

Hillary has had a prolonged, long-term engagement with US minority groups through their politicians, organizations, activists, and all the other relevant power blocks. She has traction there, she understands how to speak to the issues that specifically matter to them in the language they usually use...

but for as long as the United States continues to elects a monolithic executive via one-pass plurality in an electoral college, it simply cannot sustain any more or fewer than two. While additional parties probably cannot be sustained in the current system (I think there's some nebulousness given l...

The best argument against characters regularly upgrading magical equipment as they level up is that it is something not often done by characters in actual D&D novels . While I haven't checked in on Drizzt in a while (thankfully), I suspect he's using the same two scimitars he acquired in the lat...

Assuming that most troops would have identical equipment and generically derived stat blocks, eg: "3000x Human Warrior 2: Longsword, Chainshirt, Wooden Shield", then it's easy to type that sort of thing in as a line in an army description. The thing is, generally one has other variables t...