The Gaming Den

The appendices are a nice touch, as are the handout pamphlets.

Extracting sunbeams from cucumbers is a reference to Gulliver's Travels, of course.

Thaluikhain wrote:

hogarth wrote:

Anon_issue wrote:(so you can't have the lost Dwarven city of Detroit)

I played in a long-running campaign that started in the city of Orcland, New Zealand.

Please tell me there was at least one Noble Lorde.

Lorde would have been 5 years old at the time.

Anon_issue wrote:(so you can't have the lost Dwarven city of Detroit)

I played in a long-running campaign that started in the city of Orcland, New Zealand.

Does it still have the giant slug encounter from Dragons of Autumn Twilight? That's my favourite part of the original trilogy: a round-by-round, blow-by-blow account of the party trying and failing to kill a giant slug.

OgreBattle wrote:Y'all ever played a game where the opposition party's use of dailies and encounters was taken into account when they fight the PC's?

On rare occasions in published modules I'll see a stat block for a spellcaster saying "NPC has already cast spells X and Y today". But otherwise, no.

As a DM it's nice when players have resources that line up with the thing I'm designing. If they have N daily powers, then I get a cheap source of tension when I give them nearly N daily problems. Do your players know in advance that they will see N encounters in one day? If not, then it seems to m...

Libertad wrote:The Champion is a good combat-heavy class, although it’s a bit mixed in practical play.

Have you played this game? I assumed your opinions were only based on reading through the rulebook (not that there's anything wrong with that).

My main problem with puzzles (and most mystery minigames are just a variant of a puzzle, in my experience) is that only one or maybe two people are engaged with it while the rest of the players are just sitting around. At least in an escape room you can split into teams of one or two and solve multi...

One observation I've made so far is that hit points and critical existence failure work really well to allow for really "over-the-top" descriptions and making things seem more awesome than they actually are. Even magic missile can seem pretty epic and awesome if given the right narration ...

I vaguely remember that 1e had non-lethal damage rules, where a character could beat a monster into submission. In fact, I think those rules, as I remember them, were designed to defeat and tame dragons. The 1E DMG also had pummeling rules (besides grappling rules and overbearing rules) for use aga...

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:you'll have to actively try not to engage with it when you get back to town only to find it's being raided by those orcs you ignored.

That's what's great about being murder hobos: there's always another town. Why go back?

I still don't really get it, though... don't the vast majority of players and DMs enjoy context? Don't most people enjoy context? :confused: As long as it's not a lot of work. But if I'm just in the mood to stab some orcs, I might not give a shit about engaging the GM's carefully crafted campaign w...

"Beer and pretzels" implies, to me, gaming that is casual and low-thought. That seems orthogonal to the embedded / non-embedded distinction. I have no idea how you would [...] start exploiting the situation into which we've dropped our orc warcamp. Maybe they look at the map and sees that...

In ye olde days, we would have called your "unembedded" game a "beer and pretzels" game. I.e., something you don't have to think about too hard in order to play. I think that might be backwards, in an "embedded" game then sometimes you get turned into a vampire and jus...

In ye olde days, we would have called your "unembedded" game a "beer and pretzels" game. I.e., something you don't have to think about too hard in order to play.

I prefer the simple approach of the old Champions/HERO system (anything you use in adventuring you have to buy with your point buy and everything else wealth-related is just fluff), but I recognize that lots of people get into the looter shooter/murder hobo aspect of D&D and pop a chubby when th...

If it's too unimportant or its use isn't obvious then some people of my acquaintance would ignore it entirely. I saw this in a campaign using Kingmaker. Whenever I see people trying to make up minigames like this, I think: "Hey kids, do you like D&D? Then you'll love D&D glued to a hal...

Prak wrote:Honestly, the fact that Gygax said it required a pixie with a penis and some growth potions means this is not nearly as kinky as it could be.

Don't forget the Cosby-style Spanish Fly.

Half Ogres are totally a thing in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. They are called Ogrillons, and the other half is Orc. The half-ogre even pre-dates the AD&D Fiend Folio: Gary Gygax had a write-up for half-ogres (human + ogre) in Dragon #29. From the same article: Pixie-storm giant half-br...

I guess big part of the reason is that you, yourself, as the player . . Kinda have to sorta go by what you know. And that is the real world. So you expect the laws of physics for example to be the same in whatever game you are playing as they are in our world. For the most Part at least. You basica...

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:Because XP rules are hard or something.

I associate leveling up at the same time with being lazy (in a harmless way) and not railroading with not being lazy.

What does "let the whole party level up at the same time" have to do with not railroading?

It was mildly interesting, but in my experience it was more beneficial to focus on one ability tree (fighter/rogue/mage) to unlock higher tier abilities, with maybe a little dabbling in a second tree. I think I played it twice: once with a mostly-fighter dipping into rogue, and the second time with ...

magnuskn wrote:As the main party healer he's pretty bad, since you want to use your extracts for buffing and such.

2E alchemists don't have extracts, do they? Do you mean "infused reagents"?

OgreBattle wrote:I've seen "Set fire to explosive thing, explosion" "here's a puddle of blood, curse/electrify" [..]

Then you've seen 90% of the "A + B = C"-type interactions in Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2. It's not really that deep.