The Gaming Den

The most I know about touhou is that the series has some really great music. I have a few of the soundtracks in my library.

It also feels a lot like the classic summoner/necromancer/artificer characters from DND, where the character's role is "provides useful doohickies" and its abilities are directed toward ensuring that the doohickies (summons, skeletons, gadgets) are always available and useful. The drone gu...

FrankTrollman wrote:Then I'm no longer reading your posts.

Is there a way to let you know when I have a correction for a computational error in your posts? Because, well, it's not going to go into the game, but it might still be important to the game's audience that the computation is correct.

Besides, it's not like you still can't decrypt things. The key has to be stored somewhere for anyone to be able to read it. That somewhere can be hacked. You can still have the "it'll take X hours" scenario by having the hack obtain a large number of potential keys that must be tested. Al...

Super-long post because people kept making more posts I had to respond to before I could finish.[hr]I think that sabs has the right idea. Come up with mechanics, then build fluff that agrees with those mechanics. The problems start when you explain your game mechanics using fluff that indicates that...

No, there are huge practical issues with OTP beyond the size of the keys and the need to exchange them securely. Not to underestimate that, as it's a problem that scales at N squared. Things like maintaining sync, error correction, spoofing and anti-spoofing. For example, if I can get you to use a ...

No, that isn't how they work. Guess I should have marked that more clearly as bullshit. The goal was to move the line for disbelief from "even i can enter a password on my zip file" to "just use elliptic curve cryptography", with subgoals of "more expensive equipment actual...

If you think I'm exchanging one time pads for that shit.. you're high as a kite. ...Eh? A single hard drive these days can store a big enough one-time pad to encrypt all of Google's traffic, upstream and downstream and youtube included , for about fifteen seconds. It would take two years to run thr...

Any Black Hat could hack into just about anything by spoofing the headers of one of the update providers to send in an "update" that contains a backdoor or malicious code. It'd be a bit more complicated than that; first you have to compromise the one-time pad they exchanged - by hand - wi...

I like this idea. There are occasionally things you come across that really do deserve, not just another few posts in a Q&A thread, but an actual multi-post-plus-thread treatise . "How do I use prophecies without being railroady" could easily be an entire thread. I think we may have al...

@Vebyast: By "multiple party currencies", do you mean: a) a given PC has multiple pools of a currency, where each pool is relegated to a respective character? -or- b) a given PC has multiple types of currencies that can each be spread around the party? Could be either or both, depending o...

To start with, you'll probably want some sort of metacurrency, something that the Players can trade between each other OOC for certain roleplaying actions. Agreed. Currency is a good way to provide explicit utility functions, which in turn makes the game theoretic analysis much easier and cleaner. ...

My gut instinct is that, in the same way we use probability to math-hammer our RNGs, you're going to want to try to build this from the mathematics on up using game theory. I'm guessing that you'll end up building something that boils down to the prisoner's dilemma in the same way that a DND fighter...

In addition to taxing size or weight, tax magic. Cast Detect Magic , charge based on how much you detect. Anybody wearing around piles of magical items can be assumed to be sufficiently wealthy that mundane taxes don't bother them much, and anybody shipping wagons full of potions probably has just a...

There's a rumor that Space Marine ended up with Bioware. Which is weird, since a 40k Inquisitor RPG from Bioware would be fucking awesome but I'm really not sure what they'd do with the Spess Mehrines.

The Gods, after getting bored with the whole perpetual party-on-olympus-and-everybody's-invited thing, decided to pivot and reorganize around more modern economic techniques. The god of tomorrow is a competitive for-profit entity that leverages its portfolio of natural and philosophical forces to pr...

One would imagine that there's actually some mobility between the turnip-gold-wish economies. It's not that there isn't any amount of gold that could buy the favor of an 11th level wizard, it's that it's so large that there's a good chance the cost isn't worth it; like enough adamantine armor/shiel...

I think there's a more fundamental problem. The turnip economy has no solution to a rampaging owlbear, dragon, or tendriculous. It simply can't happen; there is no extant turnip-economy item which a serf can trade to an adventurer to get her to save the village's crops. The solution to this is, funn...

If you changed the fluff around a bit it'd suddenly be far less stupid than it's otherwise made out to be. "Eats the brain from the inside out" is only one step away from "slowly replaces existing brain with illithid brain", which is simply an odd biopunk retread of the classic S...

Yeah, all of the games I have installed on my phone and tablet are ports of games that started out on other platforms. If all you're looking for is the ability to play your game on the bus, though, there are some great offerings there. My favorites: [*]SpaceChem [*]Plants vs. Zombies [*]Osmos [*]Sol...

Another possibility is rare alchemical ingredient production. The adventurers don't realize it, but they seriously left an entire troll corpse just laying there. I mean, who leaves behind something like that!? That could feed the entire village for a month.

First thing to decide is what kind of mecha you want. Gundam-like mecha tend to have power and weight. A gundam's performance is limited primarily by power output, but they also depend on being light enough for melee combat and dodging incoming fire. Some gundams also have pilot strain; c.f. Gundam ...

I'll weigh in on artificial intelligence and memory consumption, since that's what I do. It's not the problem. Conceptually speaking, video game AIs are twenty to fifty years behind modern AI research. For some concrete examples, Halo used state machine technology from the 60's and Black & White...

Gatestorms Complex stellar arrangements, Shift Zones moving around, portal overuse, huge magical events, random chance, what have you, occasionally something weird happens and the gatestorms start. They take different forms on different worlds, sometimes terrifying and dangerous, sometimes so subtl...

Xenoblade Chronicles is extremely relevant here.