The Gaming Den

In general, the book is written and structured as if it's just the Patch Notes for an older edition, laid out for the benefit of veteran players. It is. When they made 5th ed they did so for the benefit of a section of their 4th ed fanbase (ed: specifically those who loved their Mythic Europe and w...

I took a look at the Mythras free rules, and there were some obvious headaches. No ToC or index. Multipliers applied to your skills whenever you're not doing something at the base difficulty mean you really need a spreadsheet to figure those in advance, and that all goes out the window if you ever f...

Y'know, it feels good to read stuff like DenizenKane's rant. It's reassuring. People that stupid can't be a serious threat.

Covid-19 has been recorded in humans (of course), domestic cats, domestic dogs, lions and tigers (edit: also apparently ferrets and golden hamsters) that I know of, and very similar viruses which may be its immediate ancestor have been found in bats, pangolins and a less similar one in camels. All t...

Fast scaling by level (including for traps) means that the GM needs to warn you very clearly if you're about to enter the red zone. Poorly organised adventures may not warn the GM well in turn. This shows up a problem in PF2. Traps are dangerous because a small amount of HP damage is just a waste of...

Since it's apparently actually legal for states to put up barriers to free movement (given a decent excuse like quarantine), to actually break up the US you'd need something more. Like the immunity from covid-19 lasting only briefly and vaccines replicating that and quarantines starting to come into...

My experience as a patient in hospital is that there is no calibration of any sort on that scale that the staff will give to you. It looks to be partly just getting a number they can write down, and partly an attempt to get an angry or scared patient to back off and think.

There have been some relevant studies done on wearing non-medical facemasks, and some people did an analysis of them. The effect seems to be very small.

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:Serious question: As far as I know, fucking nobody ever used the facing rules in D&D, so what are some games that do have rules like that built into the game itself and not as an optional side-system?

There's GURPS. Probably a bunch of other games with really short rounds.

If you're not Boris Johnson or his nearest and dearest, then 5% or 50% chance of his dying hardly matters - for those in gov't they need to plan for both possibilities and regardless he can't be effectively in charge for months if he ever is again. Dominic Raab will take whatever credit there is to ...

Gamma World d20 had some stuff about likely sound shifts as languages change, I'll see if I can dig it up.

Edit: Can't find it, it must be at someone else's house, dunno whose. I'm betting it was based off Grimm's Law but that looks like a pain to use as is.

If you have a +3 then failure means at least 2 results of 5 or less, success means at least 2 results of 10 or more on 3d20. I think that means about 57% success/27% mixed/16% failure. With the 5 degrees of success some of those successes & failures become critical success or failure. A bunch of...

Dogs can cooperate and IME they enjoy doing so more than humans. If humans have a superpower it's being able to pass information on, and in proper superheroic fashion it's also their super-weakness, if bad info gets into the network.

A sufficiently strong magnetic field can mess with your brain, but that may not have anything at all to do with brain waves.

Anti-paladins were in one of the first issues of Dragon magazine. They weren't invented by Stross.[/i]

One advantage of TN 4 on a d6 is that I can work out exact chances for smallish dice pools getting some number of hits in my head pretty quickly. This breaks down beyond ~5 dice, true.

If you had a few months to prepare but not more, how would you add a significant number of acute care beds? Could it be done?

I'm asking because we're more or less in that situation in NZ and I'd like to know what to look for in gov't actions and what to put pressure on them to do.

Anyone coming into New Zealand (except from some Pacific Islands; Aussie definitely not excepted) is going to be asked to self-isolate for 14 days. With required quarantines as a backup if people refuse. Putting off the day when we have to deal with covid-19 spreading in the country is a good thing ...

Current CDC guidance for when it is OK to release someone from isolation is made on a case by case basis and includes meeting all of the following requirements: The patient is free from fever without the use of fever-reducing medications. The patient is no longer showing symptoms, including cough. ...

Just a minor thing I think is worth mentioning - if you're talking about beams of particles rather than a nuclear bomb, neutrons don't just float around freely. They're not stable unless part of an atom's nucleus. Any means of generating them is going to be messy enough that you don't want it within...

Metals block a lot of electromagnetic radiation. They have electrons which are free to move around and can pick up a wide range of wavelengths. At long wavelengths a Faraday cage can block radiation with wavelengths longer than the gaps in the cage, without necessarily needing a solid covering. At s...

There's a few 3rd party publishers who'll still be producing content for PF1 (at least one is doing stuff with stats for multiple systems including PF1), and Purple Duck games are supporting their own version for now.

What the hell font is that? If you thought Comic Sans was bad...

Missiles which execute pre-programmed maneuvers and/or home in on targets, in a antipersonell rather than antivehicle package. More like bullets than LAWs I mean. Useful and safe knockout gas. A microwave pain inducer, scaled down to a personal weapon. Or a laser blinder if you're feeling nasty. Dro...

The Chinese equivalent seems to have 3 beams. No idea if that's a better or worse design, but they're using multiple lasers too so the general principle looks to be the same.