The Gaming Den

If prestige is your control radius, then it is your domain size limit from a certain perspective, so I'm not sure if what you're saying is that different from what jt suggested in that respect. I can see where he's coming from in tying domain size to challenges, or at least total military might, sin...

The basic motive for magia – quite apart from any philosophic consideration of how it would work – is immediacy: speed, reduction of labour, and reduction also to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect. But the magia may not be easy to come by,...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonlance_Adventures was an interesting book for 1987; I had a copy, but by Shango's mercy I never tried to play it, so I have no awful memories of being given the bad touch by Kender. I also played the SSI Gold Box games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champions_of_Kr...

Spoilage is obviously an issue, but yeah, that's off by an order of magnitude. https://jref.com/articles/kokudaka.284/ Has 11-15 koku (which is 1430 calories/day for a person, so you can eat but not well) per acre. I'm not sure if that is pre or post spoilage or what, but 20 acres would get you... I...

Shadowrun's lack of Africa content is a disgrace. It's not a unique disgrace in the sense that I legitimately cannot think of a major low fantasy title that how non-disgraceful treatment of any part of Africa other than perhaps Egypt. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying I have an OSSR request: ...

For gimmicky reasons, unrelated to the practical questions, the setting has: [*] A pantheon of not-Olympians, who have a priestly caste and a not-Platonic/not-Buddhist theology. The not-Olympians definitely exist are are ascended humans, even if they claim descent from not-titans. The general societ...

Odd question - I'm a respectable programmer, but obviously I don't want to write a game-engine from scratch. I'm looking for something that works rather like master of orion or dominions - you have strategic turns where you give all your units orders, and then the orders all resolve simultaneously. ...

"The DM will hotfix it" is an excuse for lazy writing and design in general, but it isn't a cause . RPG development has stalled because it is hard. To take the most prominent example on the Den, for a game to be a categorical improvement on D&D 3rd edition even at the lower levels , yo...

I dunno, if you posit the breakup of the United States, it's hard to see it not falling along the lines of http://www.bluescreenmusic.com/Gifs/blog/redscare/jesusland.jpg (I can't find a version of this pic that will embed!). Now the CAS would probably not call itself the Confederacy (or Gilead,) bu...

They stole that accounting gimmick from Champions (where it is called a Cosmic Power Pool), but in any setting which has psionics or super-science that is "not magic", we've obviated the question. So the basic premise is provably false, because in Call of Cthulhu and Pendragon magic is pre...

I know you say that the idea of skill challenges is good, but I can't for the life of me remember why you think that is. ... I guess it's more fun sometimes to have "convincing the king to give you his kingdom" consist of six rolls with six different (half-baked) reasons rather than just ...

The size changing physics of Ant Man are in no way consistent. Sure they are. https://thetrove.net/Books/_Collections/Super%20Hero%20Games/Hero%20Games/Hero%20System%206E/DOJHERO%201003%20-%20Hero%20System%206th%20-%20Basic%20Rulebook.pdf Shrinking increases his DCV and increases the amount of knoc...

I've been super-negligent in contributing review material (work has been crazy), but even if it ends up being a collaboration, I would let Usamimi pick. P.S. if you make him do World of Darkness: Gypsies, I bet I can get Frank to team up on it. Cheaper, locally produced mild beers were especially pr...

You want to write your book of challenges before you write your PHB. So Nosferatu might be the character generation equivalent of a 3rd-edition race, or class, or meaningless nationality, but the answer could be different in a game of flower-arranging and vote-buying than in a game of night-duels wi...

A core group of fans want VtM to be Seinfeld - an RPG about nothing. So, yes, a group of vampires come together and vampire, that's the whole thing. The thing is, you can take any game and setting, chuck the missions and the metaplot and just hang out. Shadowrun campaigns would often follow the Will...

Completely independent of whether it's racist or culturally-supremacist or a bologna sandwich - "Check this background box for +1 Int" is uniquely bad design for any game where you care a lot about your Int from a charop perspective: for example, if you are playing some derivative of 3rd e...

All of this talk about attribute bonuses is completely besides the point. First, it's narrow and unambitious even as far as hacks on 3rd edition go , and second it doesn't deal with the needed reforms. Elves and Orcs are just different cultures of people which are super- and sub-human respectively. ...

In a kitchen sink setting, you want at least enough flavors of white people to have all the PHB classes in your fantasy Europe. Combining the Wizard and Cleric, but that's another thread, at the minimum: [*] Assassins and Thieves need to be from decadent city-states. These are preferably not-Italian...

Essentially all "diets" are elaborate games people play with themselves to eat less calories. -Username17 This is broadly true, with a few caveats. Sugar is bad . Or, at least, people on a Western diet generally get too much of it. Points of contention include: how bad, how much is bad, a...

Religions should... https://pics.me.me/yeah-well-thats-just-like-you-know-your-opinion-man-28805006.png why should religions work that way? Are you claiming this provides verisimilitude? Are you claiming this is good for running a game? Are you claiming this provides a somehow intrinsically more sa...

There is a lot of talking at cross-purposes due to muddy thinking. There is no objective answer to what should be a different class. In a villain RPG, where everyone plays an evil spellcaster, you might want a Necromancer and a Death Priest to be different classes, with synergistic abilities to anim...

A clan is a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship[1] and descent. Even if lineage details are unknown, clan members may be organized around a founding member or apical ancestor. Clans, in indigenous societies, tend to be exogamous, meaning that their members cannot marry one another...

Y'all are engaging in a logical fallacy that I shall call: presuming Oerth . Your setting does not have to be a high-fantasy Europe with an Olympian pantheon, or otherwise carry the tropes of Greyhawk. essential points: [*] Is there an organized church of some sort? (An established laity and a pries...

This thread has become so sophomoric that I have no choice but to profess at the lot of you. Lessee... [*] Indentured servants were not treated near as bad as slaves. I'm 100% in favor of solidarity between the descendants of slaves and the white working class; and, there are mixed race populations ...

This has a devoted community - does that mean people actually play it ? I'd assumed it was just a clever deconstruction of the genre, but seemingly they're serious. The core conceit is that all of the player characters are under some kind of wanderlust geas (something something seasonal dragons), wh...