The Gaming Den

Yeah I figured it was something like that. What I'm saying is why not have every PC be a Rating 5 TDH character regardless of what level they were in D&D or how many points they had in GURPS Cybermesopotamia or wtfever. Just bring everyone in at whatever rating the module is balanced around.

Is there any clear advantage to having this thing's micro-system be level based? I can't imagine you're going to run a campaign in one haunted house that's long enough to level up more than maybe once. The conversion would be way the hell easier and less likely to create unexpectedly underpowered ch...

Burning Wheel is one guy taking every idle thought he's ever had about RPGs, throwing them into a pot, and hoping a playable game comes out. The XP system is one of the reasons I said I felt dirty for recommending it. I would guess that most people who play it just ignore the XP system or house rule...

As far as I know, all White Wolf games had this problem. It's easy to houserule away (just make the XP multiplier into a flat cost per dot) but for some games/subsystems the non-linear cost thing is actually necessary for balance. Like in any version of Mage having 1 arcana at 5 dots is way better ...

That's a tough one. I don't think any game is gonna deliver all of that but she might like Burning Wheel or Exalted. I feel dirty recommending either of those but they both *try* to be maybe kind of what she wants.

WoW, Corrosive Vitae can go hang out with that 4e D&D ritual that lets you go without food for a day at the cost of enough gold to eat steak for a fuckin year. Bleed your mechanically tracked blood all over something to deal non-mechanically-tracked object damage roughly equivalent to a strongis...

Swing and a miss. Dementation is arguably one of the most powerful disciplines. Why? Because Willpower is a health track. People get wound penalties from having low willpower, and get knocked out by having no willpower. Dementation bypasses all armor, vampires don't halve damage from it, and it's s...

Well, two weeks and an international flight later, I'm back. Bitching about RPGs seems like a decent source of normalcy after moving to a place where I barely speak the language, and I haven't yet figured out how to meet people who are interested in something other than (1) whether I would like to b...

When I met him at a con in Dallas he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and being pretty down to earth. "We're publishing a book on police tactics because let's be honest, cops are like orcs" (laugh from the room). From the way everyone else describes him I must have met his alternate-universe c...

Achilli is full of shit anyway. He needs to go back and actually read what he wrote in the 90s. The "medieval death cult" thing was a throwaway line from the 1e and 2e core books. Back in the day the Sabbat was just a half-page writeup about some extra bad badguy vampires who did spooky sh...

My impression of PF2e just from casual reading was that it was massively, pointlessly complicated in a way that would seem crazy to people who haven't been 3e/PF/4e for years. Like, I'm an autismo supernerd who has been known to rant at normies about lizardfolk attack routines. and trying to learn t...

D&D also got to create its own Dungeon Fantasy genre. People accept its weird quirks as genre conventions. Some of those quirks are really important for the RPG structure to work. It's hard to find an IP from other media where you have: -An ensemble cast with no single main protagonist -who are ...

That's a fair point. Maybe a more tactically deep initiative system, so just rolling initiative provides players some options and feels like a contest itself, not just "stack Wits, interrupt and be a dick if the GM starts narrating an NPC doing something hostile". Players don't like 1-shot...

Yeah, I didn't get the impression it was a hard and fast rule. What I was pointing and laughing at was the complete misunderstanding of how combat works in the game they were supposed to be building on. Old Vampire is rocket tag as fuck. The two "good" combat strategies are instakill steal...

I'm not gonna screenshot it and maybe get this board a DMCA notice, but it's on page 295 in a section called "Three, Two, Done".

Getting into the spirit of White Wolf, we'll start this rant off with a pretentious title and some song lyrics that have nothing to do with anything. Book I: The Accursed Cycle of Failure Oh yeah Fishfuck baby I'm gonna fuck you with a fish I'm gonna take a river carp and ram it up your butt You slu...