The Gaming Den

I would imagine making the PCs some kind of distressed population could be shoehorned into the task: refugees fleeing a war being stalked by a supernatural terror, for example. You could also push things into a post-apocalypse future, or even a dystopian one where some identifiable racial minority h...

4e was an attempt to revive the RPG to promote more miniatures sales, by getting the minis guy in to lead the design and make them more compatible. About six months out from printing dates they realised they had a dog and changed a whole bunch of stuff... More info on this please. This may just be ...

I'm curious how DnD5e will fail, largely because it is so bland. DnD3e "failed" from system bloat (even though that failure is in quotes, since that system bloat being recreated is keeping Paizo in the black), DnD4e failed because it was trying to do something clean (everything predefined,...

I know for a fact that I'm living a life juiced with glorious white privilege.

It is wonderful and I recommend it to everyone.

In my gamgaming groups I end up reading the rules and telling people how to play, including the GM. The rest of the group reads at their own pace, catches my screwups, and generally gets up to speed about a month later. That's not ideal, but it works. It does make me wonder how these games would pro...

It only matters that not too many rules are there (and those that are, are worded briefly), to cloud "theatre of the mind". It's the perfect Mearls edition - a game that needs no precise rules to write up because precise rules only ruin "the feel". Observe it's a text friendly e...

This: 5th edition is therapy edition. And it seems to me to succeed wildly at it, if online reviews in fora and on Amazon are any indication. It literally does not matter what type of game the rules (or lack thereof) facilitate. This is an edition purely there to vindicate and placate highly specifi...

I think the only way to make sense of that is "you can't hide from a creature that can see you" means you can't hide from a creature that's beaten you with their Perception check. The Passive Perception section at least is explicit in that if you beat their Passive Perception (and they're ...

SW:EotE and its relatives suffer from its primary resolution mechanic of Successes and Advantages. On some skill checks the Advantage results are better than Successes, overage of Successes on most checks doesn't mean anything (and your ideal roll is often 1 Success and everything else an Advantage)...

mean_liar: really? I have no idea why you are trying to continue this argument in private messages, but I can promise you that that is not a thing that's happening. If you're going to walk away after shitting on the conversation with a bad joke trollpost (which is fine, it has to end somehow, fuck ...

Is that really so different from any other edition though? The GM sets the scene and that determines possibilities for cover and concealment, right? How is this different from that?

Some extra Feats and HP make the game not 5e? That's all it takes?

DSMatticus, I forgive you.

BUT THEY'RE FROM CHINA EDIT - On a marginally more serious note, pejorative terms are generally not used precisely because they're pejorative and obfuscating. Frankly, Dark Continent and Chinaman fell out of vogue precisely because... they were pejorative. Racism creates labels, and labels hoist mea...

It's pejorative, but not racist. Hell, its purpose is to be pejorative. I happen to not think that's particularly helpful. Like, a villein doesn't really exist in Rome and probably got raped and killed less often than Roman house slaves and actually enjoyed some protections beyond being valuable pro...

Chinamen, all around. Or orientals, I guess. Calling them Asians is too square for the Den. TOO COOL 4 SKOOL, or something. That's what this argument boils down to. I abandoned rural Africa as the Dark Continent as a rhetorical device. It's still a shitty place to live. I will still continue to use ...

You generally didn't have a lot of combat options, you weren't using a grid/location was abstracted, there weren't AoOs, HPs were lower, and there really wasn't a system to give levels to monsters - they were just as they appeared on the tin. So 50 orcs was led by a chieftain or somesuch and maybe a...

I think the phrase can be used for racist ends and probably has been, sure, so we'll just assume it's an insensitive title. I think that's interesting in that describing an assbackwards place as assbackwards becomes racist when some use it to mean "assbackwards for presumably genetic reasons&qu...

ArM players can get pretty damn creative coming up with spell formulae that minimize spell magnitude.

Thanks for the writeup, Windjammer. I think that mirrors the intuitive understanding of what Muto should be doing, but bringing that to bear with numbers and mechanics is always subjective.

The idea of the Psion replacing the Sorcerer entirely is awesome.

Considering the Dark Continent as being a racist phrase is like complaining about the word niggardly. Sure, why the fuck not, post-modernism is awesome. Why don't you tell me A.) what general time-frame 'Dark Continent' started to appear and B.) the general sociopolitical zeitgeist of the culture t...

I haven't played Dungeonworld yet, but Apocalypse World was decent. For me its biggest advantage was convincing players that they can and should take an active role in the narrative and world-shaping, and not just be reactive consumers of the GM's pronouncements.

So Africa is the Dark Continent still? Calling the Early Middle Ages the Dark Ages is about as clued in as "Chinaman". There is a preferred nomenclature, dude. I'm just going to stop you here. That was an idiotic argument and I don't know why you made it. In case you didn't fucking notice...

Thanks!

So, posting this: So Africa is the Dark Continent still? Calling the Early Middle Ages the Dark Ages is about as clued in as "Chinaman". There is a preferred nomenclature, dude. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) As this: So Africa is the Dark Continent still? Calling ...