The Gaming Den

Frank, I don't give a shit if you want to 15750 hexes on your map of Texas and then collect them into 246 counties. Knock yourself out. I am not theorycrafting here. I am sharing some of my experience from running a game something like what you propose. And my experience is that on the county and ki...

But a kingdom that spans 40,000 square miles still really cares where its forts and major roads, because that determines where you can quickly and easily move large masses of troops and defend against invasions. I'll grant that you care what County the grand temple of Lolth is in. And you care wher...

You're still using 6 miles across hexes for this? Because that makes your 1000 hex kingdom roughly 200 miles by 200 miles (ideally, it could be 150 by 240 or whatever) which is a not insane number for a small kingdom. But a kingdom that spans 40,000 square miles still really cares where its forts an...

Stuart Slade has a book series, starting with The Big One , that starts with the premise that Halifax managed to legally replace Churchill in 1940 and then negotiated a peace treaty with Germany from there. The US gets pulled into the war a little earlier, and the war lasts a little longer since the...

On combat turns: How long do you think they should be? And how would you adjust actions to match? I was thinking of extending to five second turns and maybe revise actions a little, maybe allow a complex and simple or three simples, although that might break combat some. I went with 15 seconds for ...

Also pretty sure there's a bunch of wars going on right now where one of the sides leaders claims god is on their side and that gets them fresh recruits and money instead of being taken to the closest asylum. Sure, but even the craziest of the religious crazies are not proposing that any overt mira...

Also, point balance is completely out of whack - skills and skill groups cost too much, mages need less skills and stats to be effective than street samurai which compounds the problem of skill pricing. The magic system needs an overhaul: combat spells are a grab-bag of spells with different themes ...

If you don't want first level characters using finishers against level appropriate challenges, just say it's an ability that unlocks at level 2. I think it would be fair to let to 1st level characters use finishers against very low tier enemies, though. I would think the game experience would be imp...

Chancellor: Trods on the toes of the Admiral and the Minister of the Household. Minister of the Household: Essentially a spymaster, their nominal job is to take care of the lord's actual house and look after the literal manor staff, but they are a Minister-level position because fuck you. Trods on ...

So what we have here is about 28,000 people collectively shelling out about $673k for a book about hiring warbands and building castles. That seems pretty heartening to me, honestly. More like $1M, because the people buying the kickstarter exclusive hardcover are buying the book, too. If your brack...

OgreBattle wrote: Which edition of Shadowrun had the best action economy, or do you figure they're all bad and you've got one that works better for the setting?

They're all bad, but 4th is less bad because the number of extra initiative passes is known and fixed, and you only roll the init dice once per combat.

Analogies can help but even if you win that argument you're still stuck with people objecting on the grounds of role protection and realism. A lot of players want to be able to say "I AM HEAVY WEAPONS GUY!" and have that be enough to be considered a star contributor and will get super pis...

How does a game like Shadowrun where all character concepts revolve around the same universal mechanics for things like magic and sneaking sell new books The GURPS Dungeon Fantasy line is a points-based, universal mechanic game with theoretically free builds, and sells expansions with: * GM advice ...

Say what you want about 4E, but it's an indisputable fact that they were bold . WotC ate Mearl's bullshit game design theories and then put forward a radically different game, with novel mechanics backed by an aggressive marketing campaign and a full product release schedule. That 4E proceeded to c...

Ignoring the awfulness of the game design and the writing, the lay-out of the 4th edition PHB is pretty good. Starts with Credits. Has a Table of Contents with a reasonable amount of detail. Discusses what an RPG is, and how you play one, including an example of play. Introduces the core mechanic ea...

Do we know for sure that human males could stab the Witch King in the face? The Witch King certainly didn't think so ("no living man may hinder me"). While it's clear the Glorfindel made a supernaturally accurate prediction, I don't think you can say for sure that it was possible for Arag...

The original Red Box Basic D&D sets (Moldavy or Metzer) gave pretty solid, step-by-step, adventure creation guidelines for simple dungeon crawls. They're not good for much more than reproducing Keep on the Borderlands or something similar, though. Paranoia 2nd edition (the WEG box set) also has ...

Oh, one of them kills half a death knight because the latter is allergic to hobbits. That is not how prophecies work. Glorfindel didn't inflict a supernatural weakness to hobbits on the Witch King. He made the supernaturally accurate prediction that the Witch King's death would not involve human ma...

A pet peeve with Shadowrun was that they put in new rules options and capabilities that basically rewrote the entire magic, computer or combat section, but would never just print up a "here's how combat works now, ignore all the rules in book 1 chapter X" thing. Which I really wish they w...

Don't forget an index at the end, and if at all possible, a fairly comprehensive index. SJ Games does fairly good indices, while WotC's tend to terrible. ie, the index for WotC's Gamma World 7e (a several hundred page rulebook) is shorter and less entries than the index for GURPS Henchmen (a 41 page...

As long as your stating powers are limited by your Clan, there are going to be Clan specific archetypes. Having a Ventrue be anything but a social character is wasteful, because he gets two of the best social powersets and one of the worst combat powersets. There's no reason why you have to use the...

For all the concept's failings, however, it's too late to try to change the concept of clans. Not only V5 is a direct sequel, also vampire's target demo treats clans as something beyond "class" or "powers"... to them, clans have a unique sense of identity, like your football tea...

The D&D model of race and class has never worked really well as a two word identifier, because the class part completely overpowered the race part. Knowing that your character is a dwarf doesn't tell me much, but knowing that your character is a thief or ranger tells me a fair bit. That said, it...

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 f...

Your campaign in particular is unusual because you have two characters per player - with one character being specialized as a battle piece and the other as an individual diplomat, and that the "battle" party and the "diplomat" party tend to work separately. The composition of th...