The Gaming Den

Maybe, for Americans, you might note, during the civil war there, a big chunk of the country stopped being referred to as Americans and are instead referred to as Confederates, and then after the war they're Americans again, just from the south. Right, so... this is really simple. All of this is wr...

one thing it really struggled with was presenting Non Player Characters in a usable way. For non-casters you can absolutely fit "everything that actually matters" onto one side of a business card. For casters you can probably fit "the spells you expect them to cast over their very sh...

angelfromanotherpin wrote:That would be an easier sell if pre-WW2 Poland didn't have an established history of antisemitic ethnic nationalism.

That's an extraordinarily kind translation of 'pogroms'

Eh. I know I've griped about 5e only being loosely attached to the FR Sword Coast until now, but of the problems 4e had and 5e has, 'not having a campaign setting' is way down on the list. Especially not one that's 'different from what has gone before'- that pretty much definitionly doesn't have muc...

Copyright reform. 5e exists because Hasbro has to put out an edition every so often or let D&D fall into public domain. They don't have to make that edition any good, but they do have to make something that is technically an edition of D&D. Until that changes, you aren't going to get any go...

Wasn't that Mordenkainen's actual stupid philosophy, where he had a whole ethical calculus of neutrality? Truthfully, I don't remember. My experience with Greyhawk was the boxed set and early tournament and set-piece modules (Elemental Evil and GDQ) and not much else. He was just a name attached to...

So, D&D 5e has another book coming out, only seven months after the last one! They're really ripping into a new production schedule. Aside from the bullshit nostalgia name, it's another monster book like Volo's guide sort of was. But higher CR and Greyhawk themed name dropping(for the first time...

Good for you. You liking both doesn't mean that a game that tries to combine the two can in any way overcome the inherent contradiction. Civ is about progress, 40k is anti-progress. The only 40k solution is guns and swords, which makes Civ's (laughable) attempts at diplomacy and trade even more wort...

*le sigh* And it goes on . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rbt3kxWDe4Y I had kind of highish hopes for that one . . Now to wait and see how bad the WH40K Civ Game will be . . Considering how much of a mismatch it is, it can't be anything but terrible. Research isn't a thing. Human tech is stagnan...

From what I've heard from backer beta participants Pillars of Eternity 2 sounds like a real turd. They apparently doubled down on 4e style per encounter bullshit and nerfed the ever living shit out of casters. In a further bid to making characters staid and boring as possible the "Devoted"...

No, but it does indulge rather heavily in the Christian historiographical trope that non-whites are the 'people without history,' and without agency- to be used by God as punishment for sinners and/or a test of faith. That the Big White Dude sits in judgement to decide their fate is absolutely a ha...

If you had to sacrifice Morality to get Endowments in Hunter The Vigil, no-one in their right mind would have used them. So why are they doing it here? I mean, I get it but I don't get it. I don't get what you're confused by. This is an easy trade in most RPGs. Especially in Shadowrun, where essenc...

The Drow have a long and somewhat troubled history in D&D of being EVIL elves because...they...have dark skin. That sounds terrible and racist when you write it out like that, but it also helps that they live under ground and worship a demon spider, I guess? I knew someone who instead went the ...

I'd disagree there. Now, it's only very mild racism, sure, but I'd still say it was racist, to an extent. I'd agree in a vacuum, but Lord of the Rings specifically goes out of its way to invalidate the idea that the brown people are inherently evil and should be fought/destroyed, but rather exalts ...

Paradox/WhiteWolf finally breaks silence; they're doing a Werewolf: The Apocalypse game http://werewolf-videogame.com/en No real information there yet, but looks like they're partnered with Cyanide (boo) and Fathom (yay!) Eh. This has been known for a while- back when they announced the new dogshit...

The sad thing is, yeah, in play it is very straight forward. It's just a pain in the ass for a player to compile the relevant information (some of which is still missing- what is the speed of a medium owl?) But despite how straightforward it is to run up and claw someone, it very obviously sucks ass...

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2uuob?Changes-to-the-Shifter Pathfinder devs admit that they made a design mistake and openly fix things instead of declaring it errata. Unfortunately, their design 'mistake' was that they accidentally made a class that was simple and straightforward instead of being poi...

Coherently. Starfinder actively pisses me off for being a fucking snipe hunt. Class and race chapters are easy (you'd think. Starfinder has two of the latter). But mechanics really need to be fucking organized, and related things shouldn't ever be dribbled all over the book. For example: grenades do...

Sometimes the weird hypocrisy of this forum gets to me. In the vampire forum everybody is arguing that your vampire subtype should convey more useful information about your character. In this thread everybody is bashing DL for it doing that very thing. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea tha...

Except gnomes and kender, they are nice to everyone. Eh. For a value of 'nice' that includes 'treat people as test subjects' and 'targets of insults/theft,' respectively. Also, Takhisis doesn't have kender on her side. Neither do the 'good guys.' They just can't get rid of the one that showed up. A...

So I did. I guess I just couldn't parse 'non-human Solamnic'. Everyone in Dragonlance is a racist asshole. Except Kitiara, who likes 'em pointy. But the Solamnics have a huge disdain for other humans, let alone elves or dwarves. Those races have huge issues between sub-races, mostly because the silv...

How many non-human Solamnics can you name? A good point- most of this crap is really undeveloped, even decades later Well, there's the whitewashed-as-fuck 'native american expy' Plainsmen, all with feathers and leather and shit, and the guy is a paranoid xenophobe asshole, and the woman is the whit...

My point wasn't that the Dragonlance setting predated other settings, or even that it was BETTER than other settings. My point was that - my impression - people discovered the Dragonlance setting through the novels , rather than through the gaming products. I haven't read a bunch of Drizz't novels ...

That really sounds like shit. If you told me that we are going to play a game about vampires and then revealed that "vampires" really just means D&D Adventurers and/or bad people, I'd probably get up and leave. Aesthetics absolutely matter and a game about vampires can't exist without...

This is 100% false and is at best a D&D Monster Manual inspired misunderstanding of folklore. In the real world, hard lines between monsters never existed until Gary Fucking Gygax wrote a book that had Basilisk and Cockatrice as separate entries with different amounts of hit dice. Vampires, Suc...