The Gaming Den

I'm a preschool teacher (ages 2-5), so I'll list some of the things we do. First however, I want to make it clear that discipline at school isn't the same as at home. While we have to deal with more children at a time our day with the children ends and they go home. A lot of kids are able to hold th...

Fedor was a combat Sambo champion before he entered MMA. Sambo was developed for the red army, primarily from a judo base. This was in the early part of the twentieth century so judo looked different than it does now. Since then Sambo moved along its own track, or rather tracks. There are two branch...

You still need a sub-basement tier, then, for the commoners who hire those farmboys. You could do that with the backgrounds. Backgrounds could give your character some hit points, (added to your HP for size that was suggested earlier) basic saves and skills. Most npcs would just have a background. ...

Could you make a game that feels "retro" while also building on 40 years of gaming being a thing? I can't imagine that bad design was the entirety of the feel of AD&D. Torchbearer creates stories that are very similar to old-school D&D and identical to what most OSR fans say they ...

Kenneth Chase gives a pretty impressive breakdown on the differences between Western and Eastern military needs and how those needs affected the development of gunpowder weapons.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Fi ... nWJkYRCJ4C

It's a scholarly book, but still pretty readable.

Silva, have you looked at Burning Empires at all? It has the PCs take on roles like "admiral of the planetary navy" and other archetypes with lots of political power. It's also a really strict game when it comes to choosing what scenes to play. In fact, all games are meant to involve the i...

Nards! Too many tabs open at once.

Fixing the alternate universe THAC0 that ACKS favors is not too difficult. You just need to convert everyone's throw progression into an attack bonus progression and add 10 to all the ACs. 30 minutes of work tops, including making a cheat sheet and printing it out. The other major grognardy bit is r...

Yes, only PCs who are thieves (or interested in running thieves' guilds) will use this, but it only comes up once an in-game month. We generally have a flurry on downtime activity when the party returns to their home city, the casters want to make magic items and the warriors recruit mercenaries. I ...

I've been running a campaign in Adventurer, Conqueror, King for a long time now and the characters are really coming to grips with the domain level play. I'm finding that the system for running a criminal syndicate isn't really doing what we want it to. In ACKS a player can form a thieves' guild and...

I missed the fight live and just got a chance to watch it now. What fix? Mendes spent almost all the time they were standing hanging out in McGregor's reach and eating body kicks. His take downs were good, but they always landed him in guard and McGregor was good about breaking down Mendes' posture ...

I liked the way raptorans looked. There was a dive attack prestige class that I remember having pretty good art. The combination of human faces and taloned feet to go with their wings hit the right buttons for me. That said, I just looked them up again and was surprised by how late they got actual f...

Torchbearer is all about grinding you down during gungeon crawls. While there isn't a sanity track, conditions include angry and afraid along with physical conditions like exhausted and injured.

I have the domains at war books. The book lists several different ways to raise armies. Hiring mercenaries, conscripting peasants, training militia, and buying slave soldiers. Mercenaries are professional soldiers who are already trained and equipped. A typical party has been hiring small groups of ...

However unlike Old School games where you have to MTP everything because you class abilities suck/don't exist and there are no other rules, you'd instead have a robust set of rules for doing thing as a medium to small sized humanoid which would be your primary means of doing stuff. This is a huge p...

Outside of combat, Conan is also a skilled infiltrator and survivalist. He also is routinely able to seduce female NPCs and charm or impress males into being his ally. These skills can meaningfully contribute to a lot of challenges.

Do peasants have a clan affiliation or is it strictly for the upper classes? Will there be military conflict between Daimyo without necessitating a response from the Emperor? I assume we want Japanese castles because they look awesome but they imply internal conflict (or regular attacks that can str...

What are players and their characters going to be doing? For example, are we moving unit counters around a hexmap while our characters either acts as solos or give buffs to an attached unit? I'd be very interested in a mass combat system that allows for PCs to take part in different levels on the ba...

I've definitely been in games where the action grinds to a halt because we failed a few rolls. In Burning Wheel revised they use the example of a locked door, if the players fail to pick the lock or knock down the door they are stymied but with a fail forward mechanic the door can be bypassed with t...

A few weeks ago I was chatting with some of my gaming friends about Cosmic Patrol and opined that it'd be cool if there was a game where Mars was Burrough's Barsoom and the other planets were similarly inhabited for pulpy adventure. I'm aware of Space 1889 but I assume it's not very good (feel free ...

What about reach weapons in a system that uses more abstract zones rather than 5ft squares? In Burning Wheel Gold players make an opposed speed test with a bonus for longer weapon (and other things). The winner gets bonus dice based on the length difference between the two weapons. So in spear vs da...

This is a pretty minor nitpick, but as a lifelong Brooklynite and Crown Heights resident I think Baron Capac's fiefdom should drop the North from the Brooklyn. The term "North Brooklyn" is typically associated with Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick.

In my ACKS game I drew all the major political players on index cards and have been giving them to the PCs when they meet. I like drawing and they were just mugshots so it was prep that was easy and enjoyable. I also echo the advice of having some NPCs be up front with their positions. It sounds lik...

When I play D&D style games I love tiny men. Henchmen/cohorts who have real classes and are only a few levels behind are very useful but I really feel like my character has "made it" when he's being followed by ten or so knights or has a longship full of raiders at his disposal. I have...

My favorite rule in Fate is that the players each write a backstory adventure then pass it to another player, who then writes their character into the story. The stories generate aspects for the characters (which give them bonuses on rolls) and create a web of connections. Burning Wheel's beliefs ar...