The Gaming Den

The next installment of my quest to have everyone explain how their heartbreakers work in discrete chunks has arrived. Now I'd like to know if and how you have approached dividing magic up in your game and setting. I'm interested in the in-world fiction, the effects you've relegated to each kind of ...

At 1st level, it is 50/50, and characters have roughly 2x as many hit points as their 3.x counterpoint. VP increases like 3.x (a fixed amount based on class plus CON); WP increase by WP only. So if a class has 10 HP, and a character has a +4 CON, they'd have 14 WP/14VP at 1st level; 18/28 at 2nd le...

If digging deep is dependent on allies then the focus will be shifted towards taking the allies out In my conception, Digging Deep is a free action you can take after taking damage, even if it's not your turn. (So, not dependent on allies.) Another approach is to have a Staggered/Dizzy state that s...

I may be misunderstanding... But let's say I 'dig deep' so I can avoid my Hit Points dropping to zero. As a result, I make a roll on the Wound Table and I get a 9+ (Tis but a scratch). I'm now at a penalty on the wound and incapacitation table. It is not clear if I'll heal on my own (it's not a lig...

For a moment, I was pretty pleased with myself after I saw the number of replies in this thread... Is Might an ability modifier on the same scale as 3.5e ability scores? Is your roll on the wound and incapacitation charts affected by your -1/-2 penalty to all rolls from wounds? Can someone with +8 M...

I know that a bunch of people on the board are working on their own Fantasy Heartbreaker systems. I was hoping that we could talk a little about how we're handling different design challenges and goals. I have several goals for my own heartbreaker that have informed what I'm doing with damage. I'd l...

In the last decade (dang...) I got back into gaming regularly when a games cafe opened in my neighborhood. I also met my now white and introduced her to RPGs. I got into the OSR scene and ran a 2 year ACKS campaign before realizing that the OSR was a dead-end and had a super toxic community. (Who wo...

Could something like an advanced background help with the sages/specialist question? What I’m thinking is that a creature can trade out their ability to gain levels for a Profession that gives them a bunch of skills and abilities related to that profession. In successive tiers there are better profe...

Chamomile, what exactly am I wrong about here? Not Chamomile, but I’ll bite. You’re wrong because your initial response to hearing about a left-wing leader (who slashed poverty and inequality in his country while boosting the economy and promoting racial equity) being deposed by a right-wing coup w...

It really is an pre-scientific epistemology isn’t it? Natural rights are enumerated, principles are derived from them, and then the real world evidence is squidged into a shape that fits the principles. It reads a lot like medieval philosophy in that way. Incidentally, the libertarian answer to the ...

Connecting granaries and temples to the fortifications discussion earlier, what if holdings had two values? One being the holding’s level and the other being it’s breadth. So a citadel is a level 6 castle, but a citadel with a high breadth would mean the domain also had numerous redoubts and smaller...

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey. Oh cool, she was the guest on last week’s Citations Needed ( https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-91-its-time-to-retire-the-term-middle-class ) and had some interesting things to say about organizing. I’ll check out th...

AC0 is obviously being disingenuous as fuck because he barely read people’s posts, so he’s unlikely to read any actual books. But, a TGD leftist reading list could actually be pretty helpful and interesting. I enjoyed World Systems Analysis by Wallenstein when I read it in grad school. (I should rer...

Well, as Frank noted, the defense of Libertarianism ended up as tiresome defense of white supremacy. Ho hum. Still, it was enjoyable to read what different posters chose to focus in when explaining why libertarianism is an ideology of shallow thinkers. I was a little disappointed that AC0’s defenses...

ArmorClassZero, Well, so much for effort posting. Way to skip past the meat of my post and jump straight to the appeal to decency at the end. (Incidentally, “people are inherently selfish, so we shouldn’t try to govern them much at all” is also stupid. That’s a strawman, but so is Bastiat’s characte...

AC0, you’ve made a lot of claims in this thread that people don’t understand “real” libertarianism. I would posit that most people here understand it better than you do; in that they understand it as a political tool used by the very powerful to convince the slightly-more-powerful-than-average to su...

This is probably too fiddle and complicated for a subsystem of a subsystem, but what if prestige was wagered on actions? The king bets a certain amount of prestige that they can win a war or whatever. If they succeed, they get that prestige back with a bonus. If they fail. The prestige is lost.

If the player characters are building a barn, they can just build a barn. Make craft checks, haul wood around, figure out how many hit points the walls have, and so on. Whether you're bashing rocks together or printing circuit boards, if you're doing it yourself you don't need abstraction or a sepa...

The main thing I found interesting in An Echo Resounding was that the PCs could effectively adopt a village and start playing the domain game more or less whenever they wanted. Similarly, when I ran ACKS the PCs were keen to start their domains well before they’d reached “name level.” (Especially si...

Some casual googling suggests that it’s related to some legitimately tragic personal situations.

An Echo Resounding is an interesting contrast to ACKS because it approaches the challenge of domain play from the opposite direction. Ot’s Very abstract, top down and games. Areas have military, social/civil and wealth ratings that they roll to do things on the domain level. It’s kind of cool, but d...

The Kickstarter for this book actually led to me finding out Macris is an alt-right executive after reading a thread on Autarch's forums. Vox Day put up the money to have a custom class put in the book. It was going to be a dark lord trope and he joked online about how the illustration would feature...

OK, I see how that could work for sandbox games or adventures made by a group’s MC - the PCs’ clans become the focus and the other clans just provide background extras in different colored kimonos. But what about pre-written adventures? A party whose clans match up with major NPCs’ would presumably ...

Overall, I like the clans and agree that clan is a better word choice than any of the alternatives. I feel however, that there are two conflicts in the way clans have been described in this thread. The first is the number of clans and their use as a source of connections for the player characters. I...

When I was first introduced to Werewolf, I thought it was cool that the five forms meant that PCs could turn into different werewolves from fiction. I saw glabro as the Lon Chaney wolfman, hispo as the large quadruped of American Werewolf in London, lupus as turning into a regular wolf, and crinos a...