The Gaming Den

So there's a standing problem, in nominal D&D demography, with having humanoids that live for 700 years but don't ordinarily aspire to very much more than Men who survive for a mere eighth of that time. What are level 1 Elves doing with so much extra time? Why do even the extraordinary, PC-quali...

I'm coming from a position of nearly perfect ignorance: How often do people end up generalizing? Is there anybody currently putting significant investments into pistols when they've gone heavy into squad-operated weapons that is going to suddenly and destructively have a whole bunch of nontrivial ex...

Momentum does matter because momentum is conserved. In a head-on collision: rider A is a 1000kg knight moving at 5m/s rider B is a 250kg light cav moving at -10m/s. Both have a kinetic energy of 25,000, right? But the knight has a *momentum* of 5,000 while the light cav has a *momentum* of -2,500, ...

Doesn't really set it apart from any other format, and fifty dollars for a deck still beats the ever-living shit out of Standard.

But I do happen to have an Armadillo Cloak.

Yeah, Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Evolved was mostly predicated on delivering a reconsidered Vancian system and spell proficiency was one of the inclusions. I can't offer any raving review about the product but it achieve the fantasy heartbreaker gold-standard of delivering essentially a full alte...

Yeah I'm down for a person's grip on objective reality to slip along a status meter just like moving from shaken to panicked or chilled to ice-cube'd, but the notion of hard-wiring it to illusion spells, specifically and exhaustively, instead of being the result of direct mental impairment (and leav...

Yes, I too can ask google for the top ten pauper decks, I was hoping for a little more in the way of discussion.

I wish I had more to say, because I really like the idea of Pauper, but I'm not into it and have nothing to reflect upon personally. But I was thinking that Pauper would be an excellent format to get into so that I could assemble a bunch of moderately priced decks that were all documented as being o...

To extend that idea, perhaps make it similar to Earth, and have fantasy counterpart cultures, but base them on submissions from people who actually live in the real world equivalents of those places? Sounds awful. Very close to 0% of respondents are going to be from a pre-industrial society and wil...

"Illusion" damage would be pretty bullshit but I wouldn't disapprove of "hallucinogenic" damage. It is an impairment I have personally incurred by several variations and find it completely reasonable that stacking a couple such effects could push a person from zero through modera...

Part of the 200G you will experience on hitting the ground when falling from a very high height is in fact the 1G of regular old gravity you feel when you just stand on the ground. Same for swinging a bat and hitting a ball, or a head, the force applied through the impact does add to the force of i...

I mean, that's what infinity means; if it ever could happen it is happening an infinite number of times If I started to transcribe the digits of pi but skipped writing every numeral 4, I would still be writing an infinitely long, non-repeating, irrational string, but it would never ever contain my ...

So... does this mean charging with lance on horseback should be x4 more powerful than Ussain Bolt charging with a lance? No. At constant power, force diminishes proportionally to positive changes in velocity. At constant power, top speed is achieved when exerted force is equal to opposing forces, s...

To be absolutely fair, it just means that Tippiverses don't exist and the campaign world actually takes place on a plane of the abyss, because all the others were destroyed. The only safe space is being mind blanked inside a magnificent mansion with 9' ceilings. I mean, that's what infinity means; ...

At a glance, you could make the Adepts focus on a field of magic that pertains to a fictional, essential force which the characters themselves can articulate but which is mechanically superficial (for example: a single elemental force, "nature," or psychic power) and give the dabblers an e...

And does alignment return? Is it more than just a role-playing cue this time? Alignment is a thing that should be on your character sheet. None of the available alignments should be "Lawful Good." Available Player Character alignments should be things like "Calimshan" and "...

4) DO get rid of the ridiculous 3-18 (which is really 3-25???) scale... which is used to determine what bonuses we get? So not only are the numbers unintuitive, the primary number is used to get a secondary number which is the actual relevant number for gameplay... This is one of those signature el...

The only thing repellent about OD&D level caps is that your character stops advancing when your class does. If you have multiclassing or prestige classes to jump into, then you're set. You refrain from hyper-conforming every power schedule to include the "paragon" development at the sa...

[...]explicit connections to OD&D/AD&D/BECMI wherever possible to justify changes. "You can't be a fighter anymore at level X, you need to switch to a real class" would never work[...] In AD&D 1E, the tables for wizards and clerics ran to level 29. Thieves, rangers, and monks ...

[...]explicit connections to OD&D/AD&D/BECMI wherever possible to justify changes. "You can't be a fighter anymore at level X, you need to switch to a real class" would never work[...] In AD&D 1E, the tables for wizards and clerics ran to level 29. Thieves, rangers, and monks ...

What if instead of being forgetful kleptomaniacs, what if Kender had more of a Marxist concept of property and ownership in that a thing belongs to whoever happens to need it at the time. In fact that's how their society works: Kender A picks too many apples off of his tree, so he gives the extras ...

Someone on Kotaku made a post "Someone made a weird homebrew thing for D&D." Specifically, Cecilia D'Anastasio made that post. And since she seems to write a lot of articles, I imagine that she has to dig pretty deep to get "topics" sometimes. She put up three articles so fa...

Countervailing methods: In Eldritch Horror you're on a team of globe-trotting paranormal investigators. Each round is broken up into three stages. On the first, you have two actions, but both serve as facilitation; you can move your character, stock up on focus tokens, use the local training option,...

Hot tips: premising an assertion with "according to the Merriam WebsterDictionary, the definition of..." immediately dooms the credibility of any successive words to the cretinous depths of a seventh-grader's essay work. It's like some kind of magical incantation.

The idea that authoring statute found to be unconstitutional would be criminal rather than merely inactionable is absolutely fucking hilarious. The year is 2002. The Supreme Court has just determined that it is, in fact, perfectly okay to jack off to lolicon. As a result, former president Bill Clint...