The Gaming Den

The context there though was that you'd want Snow Goblin as a PC race as opposed to Tundra Halflings. Ah, I see what you meant. With that said, I don't see why we can't have Tundra Halfings and Snow Goblins. The point is that goblins of the snow is totally a thing in a lot of cultures, while the Tu...

Mage: the Ascension could get homework done with a Matter 2 effect combined with Time 2 and Correspondence 3. That's. . . flyswatting with an a-bomb, isn't it? Mind 2 could telepathically steal the answers and Corr 1 could get you the location of the answers, though Forces 2 or Matter 2 would still...

Wish for 25000 gp worth of completed, mundane homework? How much is a large mundane tome detailing how to construct a nuclear power plant worth, in an objective fixed economy? I mean, a magic item in effect form worth 25K that just changes your uncompleted homework to completed homework. Magic item...

Any system with open-ended magic works. DnD 3.X Limited Wish would certainly get all your current homework done, and a full Wish could generate a permanent effect that causes your future homework to just be done, forevermore. Mage: the Ascension could get homework done with a Matter 2 effect combine...

...it's otherwise pretty reasonable for players to look at a given drone and have a rough idea of how worried they should be when 4 of them roll into a room. Whereas the guy in the suit could be a sales manager or a fucking ninja for all they know. I've been shot in the back by enough harmless-look...

The various climate-themed sourcebooks probably added a year to third edition, so they deserve some respect.

I mean, Paizo keeps the company in the black by publishing adventures, but Wizards never did find a way to stay alive as a company except through sourcebooks.

Under this system, I don’t see why you don’t cast your biggest two or three for your max level spells in every combat. Since DND combats tend to be three rounds long, it’s more than enough. Also, it means you never cast round/level spells any more, so lower level slots are basically reserve spells t...

When I first read Frostburn, I loved that it admitted that the millions in GP of Blue Ice was completely game-breaking.

It was as if someone finally admitted that buying magic items with gold was a stupid fucking idea and actively harmful to writing decent adventures.

I'm surprised that you guys didn't mention the cheese that people got from this book. For example, Snowcasting lets you turn any spell into the Cold subtype. This is normally not a interesting thing, even with the +1 caster level if you do it to a spell that already was Cold Subtype. But, it gets fu...

The idea of referencing 1000 actions, that might in turn reference further actions, to get every fucking thing in the game done is a literal nightmare. Have none of you seen people stall out trying to choose which spell to cast from their list of 20 prepared spells? That's two layer chunking they s...

Personal or Party resources being tracked for this? Say with "Request a knight from the king", what's the mechanic that keeps that from being repeated every day or hour or so? This kinda feels like MtG where green summons a tree spirit from a tree and white summons soldiers from farms liv...

So here is the idea: what if you switched out the spells for actions that all players could use? Rather than doing what most games do and maybe include mechanics for 40-50 types of actions crossing 4-5 subsystems, you instead fill the book with a thousand discretely defined actions/mechanics. I kno...

Ok, any time you cracked open a DnD PHB, you probably noticed at some point that there were spells in there. A lot of spells. Like, more than half the book and discretely broken into almost a thousand separate spell effects/mechanics. So here is the idea: what if you switched out the spells for acti...

....Superficially, having Disney paper pushers give you irrational lists of dos and don'ts and equally non-sensical lists of action figures they want you to put on screen may seem like one of those party games where you have cards with dumb shit on them and you have to justify using them in respons...

This is the thing that I just can't believe - WHY haven't "they" ripped off more of the samurai/western movies for SW? They're Disney, and it's Star Wars. They don't have to put in even the slightest effort to make piles of money. "They" are all about taking something interestin...

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 ube...

I think a lot of core conceits and most of the setting could be salvaged. There are enough people watching Asian epics on Netflix to warrant that kind of game, so if 80% of the fluff is OK, you can make a game. The problem is that making the crunch IS THE GAME. You can throw a rock in an RPG convent...

This book is a good example of a filler book. It ticks all the boxes: 1.) Some crunchy bits for the completionists to need to buy it, though not thought out as to how it's supposed to fit into the overall rules set 2.) A heavy focus on fiction and background that obviously won't be used in anyone's ...

Frank

Next up: Sins of Power. According to the chapter summary it's about evil magic. But after this last car crash of a chapter, who fucking knows?

Would you believe that I had forgotten that this book had material other than a section on evil magic?

Lots of DnD spells do this in a low-key way. Fireball had 2e legacy text in 3.x about starting fires, even mentioning that it melts various materials. I remember the grease spell in AD&D being explicitly flammable, but it's been a few years. I also remember it being explicitly not flammable in ...

Bad DMs are bad for a reason. Some can be corrected by good, crunchy rules, and others cannot. For example, the Ass-pull DM is entirely fixable by solid rules. He ass-pulls high DCs because he doesn't understand that the game is supposed to be fun, or emergent, or player-directed. He was told to mak...

Rick routinely makes the cut for characters in the "You're missing the point by idolizing them" meme.

To add more to this issue, some of the best DnD spells are the ones that play with the physics of the game. Stone Shape has uses as weird as opening doors to creating weapons, but the ability to do weird shit with terrain features is a major issue. Shatter can be devastating in a building. Wall spel...

I’ve been thinking a lot about making a Divinity:Original Sin 2 system of interacting environmental effects.

Was Assamite Sorcery in the Revised Assamite book? I can’t remember where the ritual was that let an Assamite lower his generation with enough bottles of blood of a lower gen?