The Gaming Den

There are very few things in the source material that are strong but not tough, but there are lots of things that are tough but not strong. Halflings aren't supposed to punch hard or lift gates, but it's fine for them to march long distances and resist diseases. Lots of supernatural creatures or mag...

That's a more interesting and playable list of effects than I expected them to come up with, honestly. Thanks for sharing it.

I really like this concept. I haven't made time to go over the higher-level power lists and see what benchmarks they hit, but this kind of thing is very much what I like to see.

I'm with PhoneLobster: If you want to let players in a Pokemon game start side businesses, the obvious resource to use is the pokemon. If you don't want to encourage mass captures, then you can make job training the bottleneck. You could specify an amount of in-game time to train a pokemon for work,...

You could eliminate XP entirely and make people level up by upgrading their house. Your wizard goes up a level when they literally go up a level by hiring some stonemasons to add another level to their tower.

Are you asserting that you don't see a distinction between the art on her card and the official cards you showed, or just that you wouldn't draw the line where they did? Call Wizards prudish if you like, but from my perspective one of these things doesn't look like the others.

There are lots of things in D&D that are impossible under real physics and any version thereof comprehensible to humans. In D&D, fire isn't a chemical reaction, it's an element and a Platonic ideal, and elemental fire not only burns forever with no fuel or air required but it comes in solid...

In other words, unjustified homicide is wrong because people believe that unjustified homicide is wrong. Some subjective systems are more granular than others. In coarse-grained subjective systems, the fact that people generally agree that unjustified homicide is wrong means that unjustified homici...

People claim to have objective moral systems a lot, but they don't, and we know they don't because if they had an objective moral system they'd be able to find measurable proof that their moral system was inherently superior to everyone else's. That's what "objective morality" is . I thin...

I also agreed with everything in Kaelik's post, and almost everything in your latest. The only place where we disagree is that I don't think it's accurate to say that only contrarians coming from outside the D&D paradigm question the association between "the Good alignment" and "t...

This retroactive claim that people haven't been able to play d&d for the last 50 years is on the face absurd. People definitely haven't been able to play D&D for 50 years. 50 years ago we had the OD&D "white box," which is not actually a playable game . I'm not sure what the e...

People here are very confused. Yes, in the universe of d&d it does map and does mean exactly what it says on the tin. We're not discussing actual normative philosophy, we are talking about a game. Yes, in the real world, outside the game world of d&d, ethics is complex, and discussion of ob...

Also, disarming. Disarming is actually really useful now, especially since casters can be disarmed of their spellcasting focus. Isn't picking up a dropped item a free action that doesn't provoke AoOs? EDIT: And even if you have a free hand to grab the disarmed item, it wouldn't stop a spellcaster w...

We want to guide players through character creation by offering them some roles/archetypes to aim for, right? I'm not fully satisfied with my list yet, but for a conversation starter, how do we feel about offering up Slayer , Warden (Muscle?), Scout (Detective?), Analyst (Researcher? Scholar?), Fixe...

I would definitely be interested in seeing what you have.

Hey folks, A friend of mine is asking about playing After Sundown, so I went back and re-read the past 5 years or so of After Sundown discussion threads. And it looks like there was more consensus than I remembered there being about where we wanted to go with it and what a second edition would have ...

I started writing a review for Blades In The Dark, but I think it might benefit from a second opinion. Any takers?

Someone showed me some Rage cards in real life at one point and I couldn't figure out what was going on. I feel retroactively vindicated.

"Speculative fiction" also gets used as an umbrella term encompassing all of fantasy, science-fiction, horror, and all other fiction based on deviations from observed reality.

With a target number of 4+ or 5+, each die you roll is an opportunity to be surprised in a good way. Something positive might happen that you weren't expecting. With a target number of 3+, each individual die can only generate a negative surprise. You expect each individual die to be a hit, so you r...

Bonus Round: Porque No Los Dos I actually think that if we put everything on a frequency-of-use-case treadmill, we can eliminate both numerical scaling treadmills and "evergreen" static abilities. As you level up, all your old abilities should become more effective when relevant but also ...

No-Statics Elevator Pitch: Tightly Curated Challenge Spaces: You're writing a fantasy RPG. You say that because of your setting's magic physics, conjuring fire is one of the easiest types of magic to learn. Conjuring electricity is more difficult, and conjuring cold even more difficult. You make yo...

What you want in character advancement is for everyone to get a mixture of abilities that progress as they go up in level and abilities that don't need to. I accept your premise that it is bad to let players choose a la carte from a mixed bag of treadmill and static abilities. Making two separate b...

Non-scaling combat options depreciate really fast, but utility perks also depreciate in most games. Lockpicking and Swamp Survival might be about as good at level 6 as they were at level 1, but both are probably useless at level 11.

I like it. The biggest pitfall I can see is that by collecting lots of polities people might end up "double-counting" some bonuses. Like, if rural goblins got extra population in hills, while rural dwarves generate valuable beer on hills, then if farms go on hexes, you have to divide up yo...