The Gaming Den

I've recently started FE (FE7 according to what I've read here).
I'm not too far in (I just got the knight guy) and so far it feels like a very long tutorial. There's potential for a fine tactics game but so far the "big blob of death" approach has been working fine for me.

The Legend of Galactic Heroes novels lost me quite early, when the beginning of the first book showed how one of the character was a master tactician by having him simply follow the basic principles of war against supposedly seasoned veterans who acted the worst way possible. But I kept reading anyw...

Something I have tinkered with but haven't finished with is the idea that your fate points/doom pool whatevers are an in-universe resource. I like a couple of the implications of this- making your average limp-dick "consult the ancestors" type action more useful. Instead of "here is ...

There's no reason to say "A starting character can max out 5 skills, or they can start with 10 skills by setting their future on fire" when you could just say "a starting character can only have 5 skills." I don't know, you always have players who want to make a quirky character...

My condolences to both of you.

In my homemade system for Shadowrun, I've changed the damage system to work like this: - Weapons have a power rating, in hand to hand combat the damage is increased by attacker's net hits*2. In ranged combat, the damage is increased by a random value (so that even a random punk with a handgun can be...

Had a similar borderlands experience. Every gun I found felt puny and plinky. I liked the story but didn't like having to shoot everything 50 times before they died. Same here. A FPS with unsatisfying guns is an unsatisfying FPS. Your shotgun should blast enemies and send them flying, not display a...

- If you have a single mechanism to test, it's better to play many short scenes with different characters. The scenes should have context and be something that could come up in the game not an "ideal" situation that will never happen. - Test both with premade character and player generated...

In my home system for Shadowrun when players can't get an automatic success (even by spending points), they get to choose between: - Taking a risk of failing badly (1/2 chance of sucess, 1/2 chance of critical failure) - Botching the job: basically success at cost except that the player chooses the ...

It's not just the game: people are also imperfect. It's impossible to play with a GM and players who aren't flawed in a way or another.

Any system complex enough to have interesting choices is going to have ways to fuck up your character - the ideal is to have a system where the "fucked up" character is still viable enough to contribute to the game and be fun to play. The problem is when you can create a fucked up charact...

Article 13 is written at the behest of traditional media corporations that simply do not want to compete with user-generated videos on youtube and Facebook. And right-holders who wants to keep milking creators. But Google and Facebook were clever enough to influence the discussions so as to not onl...

However, none of the matters if people quit a third of the way through because the action sucks and the dialog options they chose made Mike come across as an unlikable dingus. Personally, I kinda liked Alpha Protocol in a lot of ways, but I fully embraced the gimmick where your handler implies that...

Longes wrote:The circumstances surrounding the passing of Article 13 indicate that it is rooted in evil, not stupidity.

In greed. And envy possibly as well.

They shouldn't have added Winnie the Pooh to the Great Old Ones.

I'm surprised that Bloodlines got this reputation while Alpha Protocol didn't. Both were janky, but I have better memories of Alpha Protocol both in terms of story and gameplay.

But I had a fun conversation with a STOP sign.

[*]Cyberware with DRM. Steal a cyberarm from someone you killed in a shootout? Hope you get the license key, too.[/list] Cyberware with a mind of its own: Your new cyberarm has an autonomous software. It's cool because it can do a lot of stuff that you don't know how to do. But it also has a person...

Going on a bit of a tangent, but would the best (or at least a decent) way of changing the setting be to change the way the game works, as the way the setting is viewed depends on the game? You're going to change the game to some extent every edition anyway. I recently had a concept of a Mecha vs K...

A former colleague of mine launched a similar service ( Shadow ). Contrary to Stadia, it gives you access to a full (and powerful) Windows PC, and it's up to you to buy and install your games. If you have a fiber connection, you can get 60fps 1080p streaming without any problem. You can probably get...

You can also imagine a modular setting. The world is defined, but you offer different eras/variants. For example you have a broad description of a city, its neighborhoods, its populations, etc. And then have different variants like "ruled by the Council of Mages", "ruled by the Evil N...

You can use "concealment" and keep cover for actual cover in order to have the difference between "you're harder to hit" and "you're behind something that is protecting you" which can be useful for stuff like area effect weapons

One of the problem with the concept of a corp acting as a government is that corp have little reason to do so. Corps have little to gain by running (and paying for) many of the government provided services. They'd rather be a subcontractor and get paid to do it, lobbying so that the contracts allow ...

You could decide on an open standard protocol and enforce interoperability so that anyone can host and run their own facebook/twitter service that can interact with the other services.

You can have an external "opposition" deck that randomly plays a card each turn. The players can play cards that influence the effects or offer them protection against these events. Back on the civilization building example. The opposition deck could have cards like "drought", &q...