The Gaming Den

Yes I know explosive rounds are used against machine gun nests, fortifications, the taliban fires RPG's into the air for fragmentation, etc. but you also know that's not what I fucking meant for that question Apologies, I really didn't. I haven't played RIFTS, but I have played Twilight 2000 and Re...

How does GURPS handle modern and future vehicle combat then? Do tanks whittle at each other like swordsmen, or is it somehow different. Would players be better off firing bazookas at other humans or is there some way they discourage using anti tank weapons vs humans? Like these are things I wasn't ...

There any good articles that disprove that 20/80 combat kill or effectiveness? I've heard it's outdated but didn't get linked another theory or study. Sure. Look up SLA Marshall and the Ratio of Fire by Roger J. Spiller for the most quoted "anti-" Marshall piece. This is similar http://ww...

tew is mentioned at the end of the oldenhaller contract, but it's just a plug. the adventure is not actually part of the campaign, though many did link them. tew features followers of most of the major chaos gods, not just tzeentch, and even some minor ones (that were created for the campaign, i th...

Now the attitude of this era is that your chaos warband is meant to be role playing based with hilarious random rolls, and not a tournament wargame right? I was there but too young to understand it...I was hoping someone would explain it to me. Rogue Trader in the rulebook seems quite RPG/narrative...

In summary: Nurgle's demons are an all around success. If anything, they do too good a job of adhering to theme, and are a bit redundant? But they deliver on the plague carnival, so people like them. Nurgle's minions are also the villains of the favorite campaign / storyline of WFRP, which has help...

Yes, the Venice canal has turned crystal clear and dolphins have been seen swimming in it, which I feel is taking the Michaelangelo a bit... Unhappily this is perhaps not true. At least, National Geographic reckons not: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-fake-an...

The only reason cyberware was remotely good in the original rules is that the original design team badly underestimated the value of extra actions, target number modifiers, and enhanced senses. The iconic Shadowrun street samurai package of Wired Reflexes, Smartgun Link, and Cybereyes took off beca...

They should actually probably be optimized slightly better than the PCs, depending on how bad things are in that system for a single character who is attacked multiple times. Ah, I was more thinking that no character was going to be more-optimized than a PC at a given level. Of course, you can alwa...

Many thanks all. It feels like a broad consensus that an efficiently-optimized PC should be somewhat stronger than a similar weight-class NPC and that NPCs shouldn't generally use the same optimization methods as PCs/ Or they should be a solo opponent. Just to check that I have understood what you ...

Many thanks all. It feels like a broad consensus that an efficiently-optimized PC should be somewhat stronger than a similar weight-class NPC and that NPCs shouldn't generally use the same optimization methods as PCs/

Interesting. I remember in the original Shadowrun, the sample scenario used the archetypes as the NPCs so I guess the designers had thought of the opposition as generally on a level with the PCs (or tougher, since the designers didn't seem to realize how important Wired Reflexer were if players pick...

In games which allow quite strong character class/type/role optimization, do you assume that the opposition is optimized to the same degree? For example, do you make NPC Street Samurais as optimized as you would do your personal PC Street Samurai in Shadowrun? Or NPC Spetnaz opponents as optimized a...

FrankTrollman wrote:Everything about Adepts is based around the fact that the people who wrote Adept powers were deathly afraid that somewhere somehow adepts were going to be good at kung fu.

-Username17

Why did they worry so much about that happening?

Actually using soldiers as manpower to build things is a very imperial thing. As in, Roman Emperors, Chinese Emperors, and Aztec Emperors all managed to get soldiers to efficiently maintain roads, but European Kings mostly did not. I could see there being a prestige minimum to get your soldiers to ...

"Haibibulai" is probably a mis-spelling of Habibulai, which is a variation of Arabic "Habibullah" ("darling of God")

Great, thanks very much for explaining that.

Thanks for that.

Did the change from 1e special dice pools (defence & dodge) to 2e (combat) make physical combat noticeably more deadly (since you could now boost attacks rather than defence)?

Thanks. In the 1-3e, how did the special pools change (I see that they changed a bit) and why?

Is there a thread anywhere which summarizes all the changes that dice pools went through in the various editions in Shadowrun? Or could someone briefly run through them for me please?