The Gaming Den

I had assumed that was a reference to Fantasia's presence on the subscription-based Disney+ service. Apparently not? But I think the point stands even if it wasn't what Adventurer's Almanac meant: Disney is neither refusing to distribute original Fantasia altogether, nor re-editing it to cut out the...

Chamomile, what exactly am I wrong about here? Well, this statement is the obvious place to start: Morales appointed the Supreme Court guys who ruled that. The ruling is patently absurd and is simply Morales declaring the parts of the constitution he doesn't like to not apply to him and then have h...

Anyone who doesn't see what's going on here is either new around here or very bad at pattern recognition. Frank Trollman has a tendency of making claims that appear to be well-informed on obscure subjects, and indeed are often actually well-informed on obscure subjects, but obviously Frank is a mort...

Not to sideline your question Ogre but I don't think it has to do that or even should. The game has always been about playing characters and that's the rewarding part about it. One person alone could happily play a game that changed scales and spent large amounts of time concerning itself with lumb...

But does it terribly matter right now? We are not legally allowed to work with the franchise, nor are our discussions going to really influence whomever gets to work on a TTRPG. Every Pokemon TTRPG released so far was a fan work. It's not especially likely , but it's possible that the guy working o...

A lot of media goes out of its way to be (or at least seem ) realistic in terms of things like uniform design, weapon specs, vehicle speeds and durability, etc., and shows like 24 try to maintain a "ripped from the headlines" "this didn't actually happen but it could've " sort of...

On the subject of ranges, I want to point out two things I discovered while writing aspect classes: 1) D&D 3.X spell ranges are really sensible as categories. Close range spells are sufficiently claustrophobic that they matter on a skirmish map, Medium range spells have comparable range to arche...

Orca wrote: BTW, Eldritch Horror is an improvement on Arkham Horror as a boardgame.

The Arkham Horror LCG is also quite good, although it is a money sink in the way that the board game is not, because you need to buy a new deck of cards for each individual scenario, rather than getting like six per expansion.

I have yet to see a house rule or NPC behavior that will successfully incentivize players away from hunting down and killing every single enemy on the battlemap. Enemies who never engage at all and thus never get put on the battlemap will sometimes be allowed to walk away to save table time, but for...

When death spirals affect defenses but not attacks, then the incentive to gank one enemy at a time goes up even more than the already quite large incentive in a basic hit point system. That incentive is already strong enough that players will pretty much always do that, though, so the effect on in-...

Death spirals should affect defenses, but not attacks. As you get more heavily injured, the risk of still further injury climbs upwards, but your ability to damage the enemy doesn't diminish until you become ineffective.

Grek is a national treasure.

There is a very common tendency to think of all statements of certainty as being either "definitely yes," "definitely no," and "maybe," and one of the most important early steps to properly understanding the world is learning that this is a really shitty heuristic that ...

Building zero-level buildings whose purpose is just to expand the area of effect of your capital's big building doesn't have to be difficult at all, either. It can be a straightforward exchange of some fungible resource for a shrine or a guard tower or a magistrate's office, and then you just get to...

Could pediepies crap just be because he's a Swede? My admittedly limited experience with Swedes was that they think racism is If he's taking orders from Nazis as to whether or not he should be donating to charities, then, no. That is past the point where his actions could have any plausible explana...

I've heard it speculated that engineers are vulnerable to being fooled precisely because they're smarter than most people, which means they don't get fooled very often, which means they don't grow up with an understanding that people can fool them. This makes them vulnerable to specious ideas in fie...

Re: races causing culture penalties, this is obviously a good mechanic, but we need a better term for it than "race" at some point, because this is D&D, which means we have humans, which means we have implicit if not explicit analogues for every real world human culture, because otherw...

Bandits are such a trivial threat to mid-level characters that we don't want to waste table time personally fighting them, but the whole thing with domain management is that you can't be everywhere at once and have to prioritize what you're going to do with your valuable time, while delegating the r...

The general consensus on Heinlein is that just about every novel he wrote advocated for a different political philosophy. I haven't read enough of his work to know if that's true. Related to immigration, Zach Weinsersmith, famous for being the SMBC guy and for not being the XKCD guy, has released a ...

Funny enough, when I hear "hustler" I think "con man," but when I think "hustle" I think "means of income sufficiently street-level that you could hide it from the government if you wanted to," even if it's something totally innocuous like cleaning people's wi...

There was no other way this thread could have gone, is there? Eh. AC0 could have not shown up for it at all. It's not like he's a common poster or anything, so it wasn't a given from the start that he'd start an argument over it. The whole discussion of Libertarianism could've just been left at a h...

Dragonlance should have moved forward as a setting that didn't have prepared casters anymore. I actually started a list of about 15 things that 3.X dragonlance should have done but it doesn't matter because they didn't and nobody cares about this setting. On the one hand, your assessment is basical...

I've always liked the perspective that necromancers are basically like golemancers, except that in times of emergency the necromancer can convert living people into obedient drones. That isn't normally a smart idea because living people produce more living people on the way to becoming dead people t...

deaddmwalking wrote: How do you justify having 3 ruling councils for Rohan?

Two of the councils are ducal demesnes subordinate to the third, royal, demesne.

They only need enough intelligence to do things like differentiate ore from junk stone, and put the former in a mine cart. We're talking about menial labor here, very basic instructions like "when this cart is full, push it to the end of the tunnel, unload it, then bring it back" are suffi...