The Gaming Den

terrific brainfart - was there one that was written by SKR or Monte Cook

Welp, ever since I had a werewolf dream a week ago, I've spent hours each day hunting the interbutts for a good d20 Werewolf class that: 1. Doesn't have dead levels. 2. Doesn't suck. 3. Is as good as a Shapeshifter Druid. 4. Wasn't written by SKR or Monte Cook. I am disappoint. Is there really a d2...

I would add the lesson that churning out a million splatbooks is over-rated (except as a way to keep splatbook writers employed). I think there's demand for more 5e splatbooks than WotC has been putting out.The 3e/3.5 pattern of two splatbooks a month was falling apart by 2007, but the current patt...

With longswords, the only way you get to the starting distance in a normal bout is if somebody's halfway through an attack

1. Successfully hitting an opponent moves them back 1 square. If the attacker has remaining attacks, they can follow and hit again. This doesn't feel right to me. In sport fencing, at least, space behind you is a resource that you use up to evade attacks rather than parrying them directly. Star War...

I assume that's a reference to the 1904/1905 Russo-Japanese War, not the Soviet land grab in 1945. That means both older weaponry and fewer machine guns than in WWI.

I watched Mortal Engines on a plane. It shouldn't and didn't win any academy awards but I'd watch it on a plane again.

3rd edition making it the pseudo default didn't really work because FR had supplanted the setting so thoroughly in the 90s. As somebody who started with 3e and never read any of the Forgotten Realms stuff, I think the bigger issue is that there was never a one page overview of Greyhawk in a 3e non-...

So while the latest entry in the "News" section is from November 4th, they've actually released an Eberron setting book since then. There's even articles related it, but they don't appear on the front page at all, which leads to a different question: how has nobody noticed that their front...

Hexes come in terrain types of course, but adding new ones is not particularly difficult. Expanding on the parameters that hexes have can be pretty difficult. Fortunately, I don't think a hex type needs very much. Farm Max Hunter Max Fertility That honestly seems cover it. Hunter max is a low numbe...

I buy the Diablo 4 announcement being pushed forward because of the negative reaction to Diablo Immortal and/or as a distraction from the Hong Kong controversy, but the WoW expansion is pretty normal. They've announced one every other year (usually at Blizzcon) and then released it the next fall, an...

Also, with all the adjacent command structures in the imperium how the fuck do they decide who is in charge? Where exactly do spare marine captains and chapter grand masters slot in? That's a major source of in-fluff tension. The mechanicus is almost never in overall command if anybody else is arou...

I don't see why you'd want multiple European civilizations in the same setting unless you're creating something extremely thorough and need all the inspiration you can get to fill in all the gaps of a stupendously massive world map. That's only true if your vaguely medieval vaguely European civiliz...

Were catgirls a big thing in the 70s? I generally think of them as being an anime/manga thing, and that didn't really have a big impact on the D&D crowd until later.

There are a lot of words available for distinguishing different type-like things. Popular choices in programming language theory include type, kind, sort, and class. Personally I'd lean towards creature types and card kinds, just because "class" has different connotations in RPG land.

Is anyone still arguing for an LCG instead of a TCG? One thing about an LCG is that it is not likely to have different teams . The alchemy expansion for Dominion introduces a single resource fork and I understand that people hate it? I only play a little dominion. Dominion has the issue that the ca...

Some treasures of the dwarves: A hammer golem and command hammer; when the command hammer is struck against a surface, the golem will strike the same spot. A master smith's untiring assistant. A Folding Pit; as Portable Hole, but infinitely deep. It's nearly impossible to create enough empty volume ...

Are you envisioning this as being the main resource mechanic, or as a way to power minor abilities, riders, etc.? In the latter case, I think you'd want something closer to psionic focus; a single point or small pool that you spend a point at a time, replenished trivially between combats or somewhat...

Two months later, Mearls and Baker convinced the rest of the Orcus design team to scrap Orcus entirely, but they still went ahead and published the bits they'd co-opted into the Tome of Battle under their own names four months after that. Do we know if they finished writing ToB before or after Orcu...

They hit it with MM 1/2/3, PHB 1/2/3, and DMG 1/2 before dipping into essentials, and then that other rewrite that wasn't essentials, and then obscurity until 5e. I wouldn't exactly call 5e a move out of obscurity. 5e has been in the 'death throes of 4e' state for its entire run. Not really. In lat...

Is that the source of that stuff that leaked over Age of Sigmar, or was that popularised beforehand by something else? Magic had been using it for a long time, and shortly after 4E it started using it a lot more. It was also used quite a bit in Warcraft 3 and even more in World Of Warcraft. Whether...

Chapter Five: Scientific Engineering This is really a mishmash of technologies that don't quite go in the Gear section, or the space travel sections, or the mecha section. Genetics, cloning, nanotech, and matter replication are all here. Genetics This doesn't actually get a section heading... they ...

I'm not too worried about the lower-than-modern progress levels making no sense. It's dumb, but it doesn't break any of the stuff that's presented in the rest of the book. What I'd prefer to see is some distinct categories of technology with progress levels explicitly per-category, rather than the a...

Apocalypse World's playbooks are really nice for the first session, but I don't think they're actually sufficient as character sheets for a long-running game. As you "level up", you can get mechanics from other playbooks, and there isn't room on the playbook to fit all the relevant text fo...

I'm starting this back up because I stumbled across the old writeup in my dropbox and name_here was interested in seeing more of it. Chapter Four: Environments The Environments chapter is necessary but not terribly exciting. You probably would need to invent some or all of this eventually if your ca...