The Gaming Den

Yeah, I don't buy that bit of mindcaulk at all. Once they know it's gone, you're better off beaming it away to thousands of different endpoints if that technology is there. I'm wondering if aside from making the plot of the first Star Wars movie obsolete, it would have any effect on the setting its...

Wish Star Wars movies had more Flying Fortress, Tu-4 style bombers, firing lasers in all directions while delivering a city-flattening payload is fun imagery There are ships like this. The LAAT gunship - that hulking thing that transports Clone Troopers around - can be re-purposed to fill this role...

Actually characters walk around describing their wealth in terms of resources all the time they just use in-game terminology. So you could describe a persons as 'flat broke' (resources 0), 'poor' (resources 1), 'working class' (resources 2), 'middle class' (resources 3), 'upper middle class' (resour...

What kind of adventures and environments (terrestrial and celestial) do people expect from a Star Wars space pulp kind of setting ? Hmm...I'm going to summarize the flashpoints (aka dungeons) of TOR, since that seems like a good place to start. Black Talon: hijack and transport and use it to board ...

Vader wanting to orbitally bombard Echo Base doesn't gel with the rest of Empire Strikes Back. Luke is in Echo Base, and Vader talks Emperor Palpatine into trying to convert, rather than destroy, Luke, then puts his own life at risk pursuing this strategy by repeatedly trying to talk Luke into surr...

How about simply shooting down the rebel ships as they went up? Even Leia points out they could only afford two X-wings to escort each transport, yet I don't recall a single one of said transports being shot down, or at least a significant number. The imperial fleet fails at properly nuking the pla...

While the Rebellion has capital ships, it doesn't have a lot of them and most of them - like essentially all Nebulon-B Frigates - they got by stealing them from the Empire. Bullshit. I don't care what some dumbass EU author wrote into canon, in the movies that your average audience member actually ...

Shields can absorb fuck huge amounts of firepower, that swiftly scales with shielding generator size, so planetary shielding makes kinetic attacks virtually useless, and missile swarms accomplish next to nothing in space combat. Canonically, shields absolutely do absorb metric fucktons of firepower...

So star destroyers are naval destroyers, the deathstar is a battleship, x-wings and tie fighters are prop planes. Actually, no. This is a trick of Star Wars scale. The Star Wars galaxy is a galaxy, and galaxies are huge . The Galactic Empire, according to the Essential Atlas, contained 1.5 million ...

Not all space battles have to be giant pitched affairs where each side has lines of heavy capital class ships. The Rebels are supposed to engage in a lot of hit-and-run tactics on supply lines, putting the fact that their starfighters carry torpedoes, hyperdrives and astrogation units to good use. ...

Star Wars combat is weird, because a lot of authors have spilled a lot of ink about it and presented very different conclusions. The standard scenario is Glactic Empire materiel and combat doctrine versus Rebel Alliance material and combat doctrine and got very well developed by a number of authors ...

My nervous system biology is really rusty, and was never that great to begin with, but I believe the speed of nervous signals has to do with both the size of the axons and the level of myelination - a type of coating on the axons that insulates it an increases speed - as well as the number of axons ...

I think that for the 'new gods' to be down in the alley hobo-fighting with the old pantheons, we have to assume that deaths don't give the same kind of oomph that intentional sacrifices do. If you interpret the setup of American Gods in the animist sense and utilize the framework for spirits presen...

'Inhabitable' is totally dependent upon technology level and economic circumstances. Whether you're talking about blanketing an airless waste with dome habitats, terraforming, or going for crazy megastructures it's all about what you can do and whether it's worth bothering to do it. With 40K though,...

One area that Warhammer consistently trips on its own dick is with large numbers. None of the authors seem to have the slightest idea what any large numbers actually mean. When they say numbers they are almost always basically gibberish. It's like having a discussion with a four year old. There are...

I've gotten hooked on the American Gods adaptation, enough so that I got impatient and bought the book even though I don't do much book reading these days. Kind of like the idea of playing in the world of American Gods. So the annoying question is- what system/game would be a good fit? I'm not sure...

The new BLAME! feature film just premiered on Netflix and it's really good. Production values are very high and a number of the action sequences, particularly the initial encounter with the Safeguards and the final combat sequence with Killy are extremely well done. It's a finely contained 90 minute...

The game has a typical open-world game problem in that nothing significant is allowed to change and every quest has to be written as if it could happen at any time. You can get every world to 100% viability and they'll still be full of bandits and Kett and dangerous predators because there's simply ...

Mike Mearls wrote:Based on what we've seen, I'd say that our release schedule has been a key component to D&D's explosive growth.

The level of either cognitive dissonance or bold-faced lying necessary to make this statement is mind-boggling.

In a writeup for a fantasy nation or faction or culture, what information would you consider useful/important/necessary, from both player and GM perspectives? Those are three very different things, though they may overlap. A fantasy nation will contain multiple factions and cultures, and may contai...

Chapter Eight: The Arsenal Half of this chapter is spells, half of it is stuff. Spells first. Technocrats call their it's-science-not-magic magical tricks Procedures. Technically you can use sphere magic to make up anything you want, but you get a slight bonus for using established (meaning that yo...

Chapter Seven: Storytelling Ah the obligatory storytelling chapter. Here's a fun line from the second paragraph: "Chronicles about the Technocracy build off strengths other chronicles don't have. Structure is the first big advantage." https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41K99...

I'm assuming here that you mean Traditions Mage adventures, rather than Technocracy Mage adventures. Anyway, the only answer I can come up with is: Traditions Mage is about leveraging the shit the Technocracy doesn't care about into things that affect shit the Technocracy does care about. See, the ...

Yeah, it's really a huge problem in any game that allows for it. It's such an issue that I've often seen game referees simply make "[TEXA$] Thalers!" impossible to affect the plotline, simply to prevent "The parties Plutocrats subdue the problem by throwing stacks of banded money at ...

Sorry this took so long. Chapter Six: Character Recruitment This chapter begins with a 122 word rant that takes Mage: the Ascension out back and shoots it in the head. I'll just quote a portion: “Would you rather be shivering by a fire, crapping in the woods and wiping yourself with dead leaves? No?...