The Gaming Den

I know I'm like a decade late to the party, but man, Scott Pilgrim is a distractingly garbage human being and it is downright bizarre how the movie plays it off as affable dorkiness. He's a 22-year-old man dating a sheltered 17-year-old girl because she's easily impressed and he likes the self-este...

I am also confused about the CR/EL/Level thing, especially when it comes to PC mirror matches or encounters where not all the PCs are present. So, 4 Level 3 PCs are supposed to run into 4 Ogres and have that be a level appropriate challenge that they handily win, and so Ogres are known as "Leve...

Does anyone want to talk about 'Leveling' and the pros and cons it brings to D&D? Opinion: I dislike the idea of 'levels'. The whole carrot-and-stick motivation / drip-feeding 'rewards' to the players / Skinner box setup doesn't sit well with me. I like 'unlocking' stuff and powering up as much...

I think banning the deepfakes may be a mistake. This technique, if widely adopted, could be used to dismantle the moralizing attitudes that get people fired from teaching positions for having done porn or had a particularly wild spring break 20 years ago. The "should have kept your clothes on/n...

I started playing in late 85 or so. We played all of one adventure before the kid with the books moved out of the neighborhood and we were left to attempt to make up the rules from memory and speculation. In late 86 or early 87, one of my friends found an indie bookstore in a local mall that sold th...

The whole system would be immeasurably improved just by the letting the player decide what "success" and "success at a cost" were going to be before the roll. If we're playing a cooperative storytelling game, why are we leaving all the storytelling arbitration up to one person? ...

The "Failing Forward" and "Success at a Cost" concepts are basically variations of the bad old days' Critical Fumble charts; just without the veneer of impartiality that the old charts had. Mister Cavern didn't want your character to cut their own foot off, but that's the result ...

Why has this whole discussion thus far skipped the possibility of the players having an army they send out to fight without them being there to take heroic actions? Sometimes you have the ability and desire to send out a smaller force of troops to deal with something while you are otherwise occupied...

That is a failure on so many levels people should have been reprimanded. Can you even be reprimanded for being bad at your job in the RPG industry? Doesn't the whole thing run on nepotism and handjobs? On a less derisive tone, it seems like being a writer for an game company should be more like bei...

shau wrote:Wizard/barbarian/ranger. Actually I am missing a lot of wizard, but I think the fact that I keep buying books I don't actually have time to read best describes who I am right now.

I am a Ranger/Barbarian/Wizard as well.

That is spectacular. Context?

I can sympathize with Shrapnel only in the case of people getting shitty with him after he informs them of store policy to not accept anything larger than a $20. At that point, the reasonable person says, "Oh, I'm sorry, here's a $20." If they don't have a smaller bill, then go ahead and a...

Another question, about D&D combat: is there a way to make it feel less like "OK, now we stand stock still and take turns punching each other as hard as we can like we're in a fist debate" and more like there's actually a back and forth with parries and repositioning and actual intera...

Would it be sensible to set things such that having the skill in question gave you a bonus to the roll, but how much of the skill you had was irrelevant? Or have the power be it's own skill that you could sink points into to be better at? So having Medicine on a necessary power roll just gave you +1...

If your plan is to actually persuade people to vote for your candidate next time, "you and everyone like you will never, ever be welcome in the society we hope to build" is a pretty shitty opening gambit. Isn't that essentially the gambit the Republicans use against anyone that falls outs...

Project Zomboid is another pretty good video game. You are a lone survivor in a zombie apocalypse and have to scavenge food, weapons, and supplies to eventually build a safe house and try to be come self-sustaining.

This almost sounds like the players will be playing Agent Smith against an NPC Neo and Zion crew.

Voss appears to be of the opinion that planeswalkers should consider a ravine a challenge worthy of table time. That's barely true at level 1. Not disagreeing with this, but at what level should all the things that are real challenges or difficulties in our world become trivial in D&D land? Or ...

My condolences, Shrapnel.

Instead of focusing on how the feats are big or small or whatever, why not focus on a system that at least kinda-sorta works: Wizard spells. Not in the "I took your spell book so now you can't do prepare anything" bs, or even specifically how they prepare spells at each spell level, but o...

Congrats on the good stuff happening, Prak.

I feel that I have to interject at this point that, supported by the rules or not (most likely not), we've mostly played that unconscious targets don't roll saves period. If an unconscious creature gets hit with a fireball, it has to rely on the roll of the damage dice and any fire or spell resistan...

Congratulations!

Aside from the actual rules argument going on here, this whole issue boils down to whether or not you feel that the players and NPCs should intrinsically know which team they're on and who is an ally with good intentions. If you feel that players should be able to accept spells cast by another playe...

ishy wrote:I don't know about you, but if my my trusted friends and allies cast a hostile spell on me, I'll try to resist it. And probably wonder if they were mindcontrolled or something.

I hope you roll to resist every spell cast on you by the other players sitting at the table all the time as well.