The Gaming Den

Are you shitting me up the ass? Magic Missile and Phantom Steed are terrible spells for transportation and killing in the context of the modern world, let alone D&D. Magic Missile struggles to get an effective range of 200 feet, and that's from relatively rare casters. It's only useful in the c...

I found myself incapable of finding any shits to give about specific mechanics of Starfinder and their failures after a cursory examination of the book revealed that it utterly fails at emulating or producing any sort of space setting, including - and particularly so - scif-fantasy space opera, peop...

A starting Mage in Shadowrun is like a 7th circle Wizard in Earthdawn. And you barely notice, because honestly it takes a lot of D&D style spells to match the basic abilities you have by owning a car, a gun, and a phone. -Username17 Phantom Steed and Magic Missile are better than a car or a gun...

Once upon a time mages, and clerics, and whatever, created great wonders and made life safe and secure for everybody. Then they died out naturally or fucked off in one way or another - maybe turned themselves into undead or something esle that no longer gave a shit about people in attempts to attain...

You want breakpoints? Here are some of those I've strived to fix in my own DnD fork (which will probably be updated with a lot of new material next month). (1)3.X got stuck in the weird place where it wanted to be a square-based skirmish wargame, but without going all the way and rejecting the abili...

Replacing the blood pool with hunger does have some mechanical advantages. Maybe, but - let bigger buffs of urban fantasy correct me if I'm wrong - it was decades since anything with vampires as protagonists made a big deal out of feeding. Even Tokyo Ghoul pretty much never returned to logistics of...

The key thing about Star Wars ships is that their weapons are fucking awful . Star Wars ships burned their way through an asteroid field only a couple orders of magnitude less dense than a solid planet. For days on end. Death Star's firepower scaled down to Star Destroyer size still means the amoun...

It seems they are still laboring under delusion that struggle against vampiric hunger was the main, or at least one of the key parts of the game. If my experience with VtM is in any way indicative, actual players try to get the problem of feeding and general logistics of their vampire life out of th...

Whatever disclaimers you write in your book, a significant chunk of your players will treat level 1 as the default experience. It will be the first campaign they play with your system, and if it's not the "real D&D" they were advertised, they may not play a second. If it ever comes to...

Having characters that are big bags of HPs from level 1 may be the fastest solution to the sudden character death syndrome, but it fucks with the ability to tell stories where sudden death from a single crossbow bolt is supposed to be a viable threat. My own solution is to explicitly segregate level...

The ability to forego your standard action for another swift is in these rules since the earliest versions, OgreBattle. To think of it, perhaps I need to post at least a relatively detailed list of significant changes, additoons, and stuff I'm working on, here in forum post, to invite more discussion.

Thanks for the answers. After discussing the problem with my group, I've decided that just allowing a character's swift action to be used at any time before that character's next turn would be the least problematic solution of those I see, if only because it is simpler and streamlines the system. Gi...

Another question arose in the process of reading various forums. I've noticed that at least some people intensely dislike the idea of "action debt" on which immediate actions work in ToB and consequently in this DnD fork, that is of being penaltised in the next round for taking an immediat...

4E monsters suck donkey dicks on the conceptual level. (1)Lack of ability standardization means that you have to examine abilities for every single monster carefully. (2)These abilities are unimpressive shit with rarest of exceptions. Consequently, monsters who are supposed to be world-destroying el...

It's like having a triad of Past, Present, and Future. It's cool and mystical sounding, but those aren't teams you can join or fight against. Uh. Teams fighting for Past vs. Present or Present vs. Future are quite plentiful in fiction (granted, most often when the author wants to send a shitty mess...

Every skill in the current d20 system is something that mundane people can do. Half of its problems lie in the exact fact that very little of that scales well to superheroic level or is not rendered obsolete by low-level spells. Personally, I've split d20 skills into two different piles - the first ...

As the question of complexity is already covered in the thread, I'd like to bring another problem. Derp Heresy supposedly emulates books where your average named Inquisitorial acolyte can blast his way through considerable numbers of heretic mooks and common criminals, action-movie style, and campai...

Well, the thing about that is it creates some weird world-building distortions. If having 'magic music powers' totally overrides the need to have mundane musical skill, you have created a scenario where every 1st level bard is a better musician than Beethoven. There are systems that do that. Exalte...

Sorry for not updating for so long, if anyone follows. That was totally for respectable real-life reasons and not because I played through the Soulsborne series for most of the winter. That said, following my intentions voiced a bit before, I added a high-level look at the presumed cosmology and fou...

Any comments, anybody?

Also, as it must have been noticeable, I'm tinkering with default DnDland fluff as well. If someone is interested, I can clean up my cosmology file and add it to the folder as well.

Judging by what goes on in the wide world, and by that I mean popular CRPGs? (1)The classic human/elf/dwarf/orc combo, add or take a few. Dwarves may steer more in the gnome/halfling direction, if Final Fantasy MMOs are anything to go by. (2)Furry people. Catfolk alone may actually eclipse most of t...

I'm glad to present the next iteration of my rules blueprint, and probably the last before shifting regular posting to the homebrew forum. https://yadi.sk/d/iLt9OCTusGGRg Besides various fixes throughout the existent chapters and application of the changes contemplated in the post directly above, a ...

Do people actually never use elixirs in Final Fantasy just because of sheer hoarding instincts? I can only tell for myself, but I almost never use elixirs in Final Fantasy because almost all Final Fantasies are easy as fuck outside of optional bosses; sometimes you don't need consumables at all, so...

And no, you don't need "virtue signaling", you just need the ability to say "Someone is wrong on the internet ... meh, not my problem." Well, unless mod also think that person is wrong, in which case you're free to drag him and his opininion through the mud. Rpg.net moderation n...

One problem (or maybe benefit) of being away from my home PC and having no Internet connection for a few days is that it gives time to think, instead of typing away more content. And I was thinking on the following. At the moment my system already has four Defenses due to distinction between Fortitu...