The Gaming Den

The only two eras that have ever really mattered for play were the Age of Despair (post cataclysm, through war of the lance to pre-chaos war) and the Age of Mortals (everything after). But there is meaningful granularity within the Age of Despair, right? On an immediate level, you have whether or n...

Does this book support trying to play in the different eras of the setting? Or is all the fluff post-War of Souls? If you haven't seen them, this dude did some decent analyses of the first two Dragonlance modules from back in the day: https://dungeonofsigns.blogspot.com/2014/04/dl-1-dragons-of-despa...

Keep in mind that, in d20, squares are five feet by five feet. So there's room for a lot of movement that the measurement system is not granular enough to model. As a quick fix, you could say that, any round in which a character moves at least 5 feet, they get +2 to attack and -2 to AC. That's a sma...

Is this the same group of people you played Lamentations with? Have you been exclusively using the DCC modules, do you know?

Romancing Saga 2 is a lot of fun, it's an SNES era open world RPG where you play as an imperial line seeking revenge against the asshole dark lord that killed one of your family members. It's very story lite but there's just enough to get into the setting and explore. So playing as my first emperor...

Like, why not make it so you can take a full attack after a move and/or make it so you can break up your attack routine with your movement however you want (like move 10 feet, hit someone, move 10 feet, hit someone else, move 10 feet and use your last attack). You could move/attack/move or attack/m...

GreatGreyShrike wrote:Gene Wolfe is great - The Book Of The New Sun, in particular, is a standout that I strongly recommend.

I'd second the Wolfe recommendations. His short fiction is also really good -- particularly The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. (the repetition is not a typo)

Some idiots suggested I join them in a 5th ed game, because it's "less rules, more play." They seem to think they're playing Heroquest the RPG (which is impossible, GW hates customers too much). Trying to use logic and facts is as effective as convincing religious people using the same. I...

So in JRPGs, in my experience, a given character's damage output is relatively stable - there is some amount of variation, but not a lot, for a given set of level/gear/whatever. Ignoring the precise math at play, why does that work for JRPGs and not TTRPGs? Does it work in JRPGs? Or is it just a co...

I summed up the problems with the adventure in this shameless plug . So in that post, you seem to treat "being the goddess of honor" as implying "adhering to the precepts of honor culture". That makes sense to me. But does Paizo indicate that that is what "being the goddess...

The resulting model was surprisingly conservative in its weights, suggesting that raw soldier quantities have a relatively small effect compared to other factors such as terrain or technology, which further research could investigate in more detail. https://towardsdatascience.com/napoleon-was-the-b...

In respect to Vornheim, the same author also came out with Maze of Blue Medusa. The adventure has an insane number of rooms (304? I think), but cited as allowing for minimal/no prep from the Dungeon Master due to the way its formatted, so I'm curious if anyone could confirm that to be the case? It ...

As far as I can tell, the paper that article is referencing is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07012 The researchers were able to automate the architecture engineering stage of a neural network design. That's totally neat, don't get me wrong. But we're still solidly in the Weak AI paradigm. The pap...

It's a detail oriented show that couldn't fucking depict D&D right. They don't care about the details of the things they reference as much as they care the details of their story and the foreshadowing therein. In the show's defense, no one played D&D strictly by the book in the 80s. This is...

Way back when, Frank said the following about the movie Sicario : Sicario. Everything that happens after the "main character" sees the rubber band in her hotel room. Really seemed like they didn't have a third act. Like, at all. The main character who we've seen having near bullet time ref...

Is violence written as the assumed interaction between the PCs and the drow/kuo-toa/etc? Are there meaningful references to morale checks and fleeing?

At this point I no longer think Burning Wheel is even a source of good ideas. It really just seems like a pretentious dead end of game design. A complicated subsystem for social interactions that can't change peoples' opinions is fucking mental. The whole thing is just for pressuring people into si...

Burning Wheel has useful advice on this I think: The Duel of Wit is designed to simulate debate and argument: A speaker convinces an audience of the merits of their point. It is not designed to change a single character's or player's opinion. ... Though the Duel of Wits cannot make a character like ...

Ancient History wrote: Recognition!

Why did you choose to write a bar guide specifically? Did you base your work on letters he wrote to people?

I ended up grabbing the Jedi Knight pack, because nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Dark Forces 2's level design and use of verticality remains a remarkable achievement.

I share DSM's issues with the fiddliness of the numbers, but this is a neat implementation of the "stealth hitpoints" idea a few people have mentioned on this forum. The distance modifier in particular is the sort of thing that would lead to a lot of slow square-counting. In F&F, would...

Has anyone found any hidden gems in the current (2017) steam sale so far? I've been weirdly reluctant to pick up anything this time around.

Ancient History wrote: The only fantasy writer I know that really tried to get a grip on this concept was Terry Pratchett in Small Gods; everybody else was just fucking around.

Scott Bakker attacks this question with gusto, although he's defs more recent than Leiber or even Pratchett.

Oh shit I did not realize Mike Mignola had done Fritz Leiber stories.

I feel kind of dirty for saying this, but Charles Mann's 1493 agrees with most of what Occluded Sun is saying.