The Gaming Den

If it's something like, "Brain cycles," then you probably just add them, but if it's more complicated, it's going to get more complicated. (tautology, I know) That's why I went into the math and information theory. The measure actually is brain cycles in a way, and the unit is in bits and...

Time travel. The first half of the campaign is a succession of doomed Kobayashi Maru scenarios. Eventually, one of the parties cheats enough to win , at which point they start going back in time to save previous parties. The second half of the campaign involves the players unwinding the stack of Leg...

I think that the objective difficulty of a game is best measured by, "how well do the players have to make their choices in order to achieve a satisfactory success rate." If skill and effort have no effect on outcome, then the objective difficulty is either zero or infinity. This is almos...

How about this: if you sum over all possible future configurations of the universe, there is no such thing as "subjective", because by considering all possible configurations you can catch all of the causal effects that you would normally label as "subjective" and ignore. You rou...

Actually, Vebyast, isn't that method going to give you the Subjective difficulty? Unless you include character optimization as part of the challenge description, each such impossible calculation will only be good for a single party, (Subjective difficulty), and including character optimization isn'...

Cave Story was recently remastered, retranslated, and rereleased for a few consoles and on Steam, but the original game and associated fan translation are highly recommended and still available: http://www.cavestory.org/

To pull some real math behind this, you can measure the "difficulty" of a task by figuring out how many bits of information are expected to be required to locate a series of actions which completes the task in the configuration space of all possible valid sequences of actions. This is a ki...

Everything else is from the first person using a personal pronoun: "my opinion", "my own invention", "I must share", etc. Therefore: Leeeeeeeeerooyyyyyyyy Jennnnnnnnkinsssssssss I'm commander Shepard and this is my favorite forum on The Den I'm in ur base killin ur d00d...

In this framework, there will be a titanic premium for equipment of known provenance. If you just grab random armor off the ground, you have no idea if it'll come with you when you respawn or Astral Projection , which makes it always a little bit suspect. However, if you know that your armor is the ...

Another idea: if the DM is really capable of pulling off low-magic NPCs, then you may be able to play effectively using builds that are extremely effective against mundanes but not usually seen because they're hard-countered by magic. For example, you might have fun with a mounted charge or hulking ...

There are also the planar currencies to think about, things like Souls and Condensed Hope. Those hold off the paper requirement for large transactions for a while, since you can carry around a lot more souls than you can gold. There might also be much more arbitrage going on, possibly meaning that t...

I'd be interested in seeing TTRPG analyses expanded to CRPGs. There's a little bit of this in IMOI already; might be useful to give it its own spot. This is balanced by the risk that it'd turn into r/gaming or something. Worth a test run, at least, if it's possible to kill it with fire it if it turn...

It's hard to pull off a manufacturing monopoly even with larger items. When you have Fabricate or Shape X the size of the items you can build is effectively limited by the size of your living room, and unless we decide to do something radical about level demographics there are going to be thousands ...

The Squat: However, in one case a Storm Giant's former demesne stayed unoccupied long enough for an artist's commune of Dwarves to simply start using it as their residence and studio. ...Don't Giants and Dwarves have some general animosity to the point of getting racial bonuses against each other i...

I wonder how closely Finality's demographics reflect the overall demographics of walking, talking things with hands in the entire planescape. If it has sufficiently high connectivity, the variance in difficult to get there should be pretty low and it should be pretty close. On the other hand, some p...

Could we have the Effect Neighbourhoods overlap somehow with the various factions? For example, if we have a smithing/metalworking faction, they'd probably hang out in or right next to the "always on fire" neighbourhood because it would help them keep their metal hot. Another idea - the ne...

Basically, I see several tiers of neighborhood. Just based on size alone a neighborhood for Ogers and Trolls could serve the needs of Ettins and Frost Giants, but not Cloud Giants. Not so much "tiers" as "you must have this property to enter". Some neighborhoods will be on avera...

If the largest demographic in Finality is only 4% of the population, there are at least 20 different demographics around; if demographics are following the usual power laws, then a sufficiently crowded area might have members of 60 or 80 distinct demographics in line of sight. With demographics incl...

One of the biggest issues with man vs army engagements is time . If every engagement takes ten seconds, then your hero can't fight that army for the simple reason that it would take him two weeks just to kill all of them. So you need a way to speed things up. The most common is area-of-effect (note ...

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of implacable forces of nature. They aren't any fun to fight against. You might be able to substitute in their minions, kind of like how Teams Magma and Aqua from the third-gen Pokemon games were all about "expanding the land" or "expanding the sea", but i...

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of implacable forces of nature. They aren't any fun to fight against. You might be able to substitute in their minions, kind of like how Teams Magma and Aqua from the third-gen Pokemon games were all about "expanding the land" or "expanding the sea", but i...

I think that " Gods Need Prayer Badly " is a reasonable thing to do; it resolves the n-in-m thing that goes on with the Christian and Hindu religions pretty neatly. It also provides some additional reasons for the gods to be squabbling instead of just flattening titans. In fact, we could u...

How about you get some chargen from the god that the other parent worshipped? Pick two big lists, one from each parent. No more constrained choices necessary; you inherited giant muscles from Zeus, but your dad worshipped Loki on the sly (joke's on Zeus) so you also have the ability to punch people ...

Spellspinning (Su): by using a Full Round Action, the Spellspinner can actually weave a spell into a web and leave it in place. This works just like a regular use of his web - leaving it as a trap or throwing it at someone - except the first time that web entangles a target, it also discharges the ...

Ok, Gelatinous Kelsey Grammer is the best part of that, Hyz. The rest makes little to no sense... Gelatinous cubes have pretty much no sensory organs with which to enjoy art. At best, they could have an artistic aesthetic based on perfumes and vibration. ...which disturbingly speaks to them being d...