The Gaming Den

I'm writing a grant proposal this week, so all of a studden this question is of interest to me :). In mechanics, or in fluff? Lots of games (Warhammer FRP, for example) have scholars writing stuff that is channeled from demons, but few have any rules (WFRP might have a ritual to do this written up s...

Glad you're okay, man.

I remember liking https://www.amazon.com/Vikings-Campaign ... 1560761288 when I was a youngin'. If you're bored, you might check if the rune rules are similar (they sound similar in that the runes aren't very good.)

In this case, I'm importing D&D, so the first level challenges are (for a party of 4): - Four goblins (or equivalent humanoids) - Two orc warriors - One ogre - Four giant rats (or bugs, or equivalent monsters) - Two giant centipedes - One giant spider - Four skeletons - Two zombies - One ghoul O...

Monks are magic knights - they don't need to be smarter, mightier or sneakier than you are, because they are wrapped in a shield of blue ki energy, or whatever. You can give them whatever mundane abilities you want, if their magic is not as good as the other cloth-wearer. Let me develop the thesis a...

These are meant to be more conceptual than mechanical. Sneaky is well-defined in D&D in so far as the stealth rules exist; and the stealth rules do more-or-less support sneaking up on a guy in the middle of combat and stabbing him in the back, gaining sneak attack damage. Clever is unfortunately...

import Assume_were_playing_some_flavor_of_D&D import DrPraetorsMindCaulk with that of the way, you have an issue with role differentiation for fighters and thieves. Since magic can do whatever , and is part of what makes the setting fantastic, and because magicians also have thumbs, you're well-...

leaving rules for metavariants like Wakyambi for the Companion in a new edition of Shadowrun is wholly expectable. That's a bad example, since "is an Elf... but black!" should probably not have game mechanics associated with it? Or, at the least, the special rules should be minor enough t...

I'm old enough to remember when 3rd edition was supposed to fail because of grognard complaints. 3rd edition overcame these problems by actually being good . 5th edition is basically an inferior reboot of 3rd edition - but this was not a commercially successful move (I'm told that Stranger Things ha...

Shadowrun added Adepts and Aspected Magicians and Technomancers and some of those caught on and some of those didn't. This is an example that shows my first point - newer editions of Shadowrun need Adepts, Aspect Magicians and Possession Traditions in the basic book . As a game develops through edi...

If you're doing a new edition of basically 3rd edition (ala 5th edition), you no longer have that excuse The process of designing new and interesting games is a type of research project. If you know how all the pieces will interact before you've put them together, the game is either simple and bori...

Further, what you think the game needs when you're designing it and what you find out about what the game needs after a few years of people playing the thing are going to be pretty different. If you're doing a new edition of basically 3rd edition (ala 5th edition), you no longer have that excuse, a...

I think adding new base classes is probably a mistake. You're going to be adding new content for various base classes across expansion books, so new base classes are basically wasted space. EDIT: because they will get progressively smaller in the pants vs. the basic classes in the base book as more ...

This is true, although a shame for my personal nostalgia. I don't just want a fantasy cyberpunk mashup, I want the signpost for the sixth world to be the great dragon Ryumyo flying above the Shinkansen. But my favorite "and so it came to pass" tropes really can't be salvaged, because they ...

Ancient History wrote:

AncientH

... harpy furry fapfest ...

They have a lot of artists, and the title "Frost and Fur" sounds profoundly dirty to me. Does it dive deep into that uncanny valley?

So you're saying no skills should scale much with level? With quibbling at the margins (leadership, for example, or general fightiness), yes. In a level-based system, you get whole new tiers of power, and at those higher tiers, skills don't scale, they expire . Efforts to maintain the relevance of ...

you don't want your knowledge or social skills to \[scale hard with level\], because then you can't have low-level sages and aristocrats. That's true! you want things like Athletics and Acrobatics to scale hard with your level so you can jump hard and climb good, That's wrong! While I don't want to...

In the spirit of freedom and MLK day, I'm going to conjure an old canard, and disagree that open multi-classing is impossible . It's impossible to balance perfectly, but no-one needs that, you just need better balance than a 13th level ranger getting camouflage while the 13th level wizard gets force...

Dogbert is presuming D&D hard , but I can see why he might. In order to answer the question, you need to nail things down a bit. Castlevania is historical low fantasy - it takes place in, like, Romania, right? Vaguely in the past? You could play a Castlevania campaign in bog standard D&D, or...

I never understood why Dark Sun didn't get official support in 3rd edition (other than a principled commitment to making thri-kreen and half-ogres unplayable.)

As a setting it's aged well, and it successfully navigates a lot of the wandering mercenary murderhobo tropes.

Frank is rather negative, but a multiplayer version of the pokemon videogam is basically a nonstarter. There's not enough there to sustain a party of characters, unless people play pokemon , and the trainer is an NPC. So if you're serious about doing a pokemon RPG, you need to watch at least detecti...

It would make sense (in a number of ways) for the Fort to use up manpower just by existing, even once it's built. For one thing, I assume that forts are also how you get province defense, since you're not counting out province defense chits for individual hexes?

To be clear, because I think this might have gotten lost in the mix: The Karate Kid has a full loaf of kung fu and also a machop, mienfoo or whatever that then evolves. If you're doing a full pokemon RPG (instead of just adding pokemasters to an existing setting), the "how many pokemon do you h...

You could also posit that when good and evil armies fight the gods are duking out on their respective plane somewhere as well. It is easy to explain why Heironious is not personally smiting people with lightning bolts, he is fighting Hextor while the Good Shinytown Kingdom armies are locked in comb...

The thing is that picking a "worst" version of alignment is impossible because alignment, especially when there are lots of rules attached to it, is beyond terrible. I dispute this statement here. Different versions of alignment - I linked to an example that doesn't depend on the double-a...

The Tao that can be written is certainly not the true Tao in this case. Souran is wrong, however - there are many relevant degrees of distinction, and the more you namecheck-and-screw-up real world ethical or religious positions, the worse you've done. You might argue that all alignment systems are ...