The Gaming Den

I've finished the "three" campaigns of FE7 and I can't say I'm a fan.
The tactical part is quite limited and repetitive and the actually challenging parts (long distance attack that can randomly one-shot weaker/weakened characters) feel a bit tacked on.

I remember reading about a game where players accumulated "evidence points" as they investigated and then could spend them to turn an hypothesis into a fact, as long as it didn't contradict any other fact or anything that happened. That's a strange way to go about it, but at least it avoid...

As far as powers are concerned, Vampire: The Mascarade (the only one I have experience with) is a low-tier superhero game with each PC having his own power. As far as the stories... Some part of the books say it's about playing brooding emo-goth characters who can't enjoy life and cling to the remna...

I was playing a "grey" jedi, which didn't help since apparently they just expected everyone to be either 100% light or 100% dark.

I can't help you there, I think I screwed up my build. My allies could manage just fine but my character was having trouble surviving combat when on his own. I ended up killing the last boss by running around leaving mines behind me. Hopefully, I had a lot of mines in my inventory and he was dumb en...

To me the first is neither the fluff nor the rules. It's the concept of the game: what is this game about? What will we be playing? Both the fluff and the rules have to be aligned with this. Once you have this concept, you can start with rules or fluff, but most of the time one will feed the other. ...

I like crossovers, but they're good as one-off events or in situations where you don't care about the plot/universe. Generally speaking, a fictional universe is made to be consistent and tell a specific story/kind of story. Most of the time, you lose all this once you mix multiple fictional unverses...

I'm fine with systems that encourage decisions that have an impact on the character's development and roleplay, but I'm wary of systems that need to be "gamed". Most of the time, "gaming the system" means having to go full rule-lawyer and more casual players will be left out beca...

You do it whenever you want to, they've got no way of knowing if you wake them up at the right time

More seriously, you've got stuff like water clocks or candle clocks. If you've got a campfire, you can use the time it takes for the logs in the fire to burn.

I've been exercising steadily for some time and clearly gaining muscle without getting additional mass. Since I'm quite skinny, I decided to eat more in order to get some mass. I don't want the muscles I'm working on to build up by draining the other muscles. I've switched my breakfast to something ...

It's game design 101: if your game has a system for something, it becomes a game about this. There are a few games that use a "generic" system meant to simulate "everything", but even these games often had a focus on what they are interested in (combat, most of the time). And eve...

I attempted an Exalted game once. After listening to someone trying to explain the game and looking at the books, I was a bit confused by the mix of mythology and anime, it felt like it was trying to mix different stuff that had things in common but didn't go quite that well together. Then I wondere...

For a one-shot, I usually start with a concept. It can be a scene I have in my head, an interesting twist, a plot hook I've read somewhere, a feeling I want to push to the players. Then I extrapolate from that and try to get an interesting adventure around this. Sometimes it works, sometimes it turn...

Thaluikhain wrote:While that makes perfect sense, how do you stop that from favouring some clans and thus some PCs over others, though?

You don't want to stop that. That's just a perk of that clan. Some clans will have combat buffs, other will have political buffs.

Italian Spiderman can be found on Youtube. It's pretty fun.

Oh right, it's for Dragonfall Director's Cut. I've been told that most UGC target either this or HK and I had started it with the original SRR so it was easier to convert to Dragonfall Director's Cut.

Hi all, I've recently released a UGC for Shadowrun Returns. It can be found in the Steam Workshop : https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1745372759 if necessary I can put a zip somewhere. It's a complete story. It's rather short (someone reported 2h) but there are many different op...

Chinese fiction will often use the term "Secret Society" for such "clans". But if the societies aren't supposed to be secret, it'd be quite dumb and using just "Society" doesn't have the same ring.

Now a more important question is how "hands off" the Emperor is. Obviously you want Dukes to lead military campaigns against each other, which implies the Emperor is dead or missing or just too feeble to stop that from happening. Or he might be "corrupted by his courtiers/enuchs"...

Compared to other animals Humans have an outstanding tendency to cooperate with complete strangers. Many animals will gladly cooperate with members of their kin but will be aggressive towards anyone outside of that group. Humans have the ability to keep track of people and their reputation, allowing...

For me the ideal RNG range will depend on the game. If the game has you play professionals, I'd rather have more auto-successes. If the game has you play a ragtag team of amateurs, I prefer to keep the door open to unexpected failures and "1 in a million" (probably more of a 1 in 20 in rea...

Everything you wrote is basically true, except that are four kinds of characters. Eventually you'll meet find the fourth one: Oberstein You're right, Oberstein is an interesting one. Or could be if he was given more space than just "enable Reinhard to be the bad guy". 'm already assuming ...

Since the end of the 2000s, I've seen "modern design" used to describe rules-light games compared to "old-school design" games that had these huge rulebooks full of more or less complex mechanisms. I've also seen it used to describe games that ditched the classic GM-Players appro...

The problems I remember from when I played (I think it was 2nd edition) with starting characters: - Starting characters have a very limited skillset, and aren't even that good with these skills - Skills are too costly to be able to get some smaller "extra" skills for fun and/or character d...

When you feel guilty for not feeling miserable, it might help to think that he wouldn't want you to feel miserable all the time. You probably have many friends and relatives who want to be as supportive as possible but don't really know how to behave around you. Don't hesitate to tell them. Also don...