The Gaming Den

I like that idea. It also performs the narrative function of directing players and GM's to think about what stories one might tell in the outlands of the Banemires and then the stories one might tell in the Walled City of Bane and how those might connect.

I've been writing under this concept since it was posted as an experiment and I'll say the first thing I notice is that it's starting to look like a system with only Skills rather than only Actions. It seems like the most sensible organizational system would be to have Calm Animal, Break Animal, Mas...

1. DnD is already of game of 1000s of potential actions. It's called the spell list, and it's broken up by level, class, and circumstances. There is no reason that the list I'm proposing can't be the same. One thing worth saying: In this framework the options cannot really be broken up by level. No...

Is it threadshitting to ask if you're committed to the DNA based power's only premise? The benefit of having a single (or very few) explanation for all superpowers is huge, I completely acknowledge that it makes for a better use of conceptual space to make a single cause for 100 heroes and then focu...

It's very dangerous to introduce "choices" into an RPG that players are not supposed to select. The fail states are obvious: you create the fake option and people take it anyway and then their character sucks; or you create the fake option but it turns out that there's a way to exploit it...

I think classes giving a bonus to type as well as free in-theme pokemon is better than restrictions. Allow having a bunch of Psychic pokemon to be a thing the player rationally chose because they chose to play a Psychic and a Pokemon RPG so they're probably into them anyway. The free pokemon you get...

While it's too early to worry about images I'll note that in my own Domain Game work there was no area I received more demand for example pictures and explanations than in forts and fortifications. That makes sense when you think about it given that players can shrug off "Agriculture 3" as...

If you can design a decent Harvest Moon minigame you're leaps and bounds ahead of the entire industry. A Harvest Moon game is part of the "Domain Game" element of rpg's that literally no one has cracked. The closest to a Harvest Moon minigame in any RPG I know of would be the town creation...

The easiest hack to make good gods "work" for the most part is to say that they are losing. You can make up whatever reason you want but if there are forces of evil and forces of good the good has to be losing if the game is about fighting all the evil in the land. If good is winning or ha...

What if you have classes based on Pokemon types. So "Normal" is your Ash Ketchum which gets some generic abilities around catching or training pokemon, that classes schtick will be about having the widest variety of pokemon possible and they give up all other abilities to be the best minio...

Count Arioch the 28th wrote: forcing mosaics onto their porn is the third worst thing Americans did to Japan.

What does this sentence mean, tell me more.

One thing I would be curious about is how badass a mortal could actually get in Exalted. If you really wanted to and went really hard with rule-fu how good could you make somebody? One of the few things about the Exalted world that is appealing to me is the idea that there's this whole class of uber...

To have any discussion about the prequels sucking one has to assume the Redlettermedia material has already been consumed by all parties present and move forward with those points accepted. With that put forward a few additional details are relevant. It is inarguable that in the 70's a filmmaking ge...

First of all I love the idea of using a bunch of grappling feats or talents to make a tractor beam master. I've never thought of that build or seen it done and I think that rules. Very very clever idea. If you find any particularly cool talents or feats for the build let me know I really wanna see i...

Contemporary repubs float so many active and insane conspiracy theories that I actually think it's easier to sell vampires not getting discovered by cell phone videos in the modern day. Any actual human playing a Vampire reboot in 2020 would be in a world where media consumed by millions openly talk...

A thing I’ve always found funny is that Vampire’s aggressive pushing of Christian values would actually be massively less obnoxious if they just overtly declared that they were in a universe where Christianity was basically literally true. It’s your fictional universe, you’re allowed to make whateve...

I was really curious about the Gramarie stuff. It seemed like a really interesting direction to take for a games design but it was so dense I didn't really get too deep in it. Then I decided if something was too rules dense for me it was probably literally unusuable to anyone I've ever gamed with. S...

If you wanted to it also costs you basically nothing game-mechanics wise to list some random ideas that people can identify Agriculture 3 upgrades with. So like Agriculture Upgrade: Agriculture 3 Your Grasslands now produce 1000 per month from increases in your growing and harvesting technologies Ex...

I like the head canon that Pokédex entries are written wiki style by lots of enthusiastic tweens. Medieval bestiaries were full of crazy nonsense like bears laying eggs in the real world so it’s totally possible that good science doesn’t exist much in the Pokémon world yet. It actually seems like a ...

I've heard the rules in Shadowrun for shopping for gear or asking your contacts to look into stuff for you are good. Could anyone tell me how they work? I can also find the rulebook if that would be the most efficient way to gain that information (very plausible). But if that is viewed as the best o...

As far as "gems" go, the idea is that they'd be distinct mana. Is "Crystal" or "Vis" better? I agree that you don't want to have people saying "Why do I care about Sapphires?" but on the flip side I think a lot of people don't know what he word "Vis"...

The one thing I'll say is that I think Gems wouldn't fit with a lot of the sub genre's D&D is used to emulate. Gems works in D&D's normal genre-less kitchen sink setup but if you're doing Dark Sun the "special" material type seems more likely to be steel than gems. If it's Rokugan ...

So Frank what do you think about trying to turn this into an alpha mode of the model you're thinking of. I know that sort of thing can take weeks so it's no small ask but I would love to be able to see this in even an incomplete skeleton. I've done a lot of work on domain stuff but with very differe...

While it makes sense to have different evil realms, is there any advantage to having a bunch of different, single biome evil worlds? Couldn't you have one evil world with the same physical geography with the mortal world, and you can walk from the evil burning places to the evil frozen places? Mult...

Also Hades is supposed to be mostly nice. It’s much closer to heaven than hell. It’s a judeo-Christian anachronism to make Hades hell-like. My basic premise is that “ruling in hell” is understood to also be shitty in some way. Even if you’re the most powerful person in an awful place you still shoul...