The Gaming Den

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaversal_system#Alignment https://palladiumbooks.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=112800 check and mate motherfuckers. In case I need to spell this out: Traditional Chinese religion is a real thing, with actual practitioners. These practitioners do not believe that ...

I think you're missing Frank's point, but I will reinstate the obvious: [*] Pokemon that you can hand back and forth like short swords are boring, and don't do a good job of providing the pokemon experiences people care about. [*] Pokemon that are hard-to-catch are a very limited resource, and it's ...

I think Pokemon Ace is a bad class, in the same sense that Adventurer (who specializes in going into dungeons, murdering the occupants, and taking their stuff!) would be a bad class for D&D. You can certainly split the classes into high-pokemon and low-pokemon: The Nerd and the Hiker mainly have...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oFQzvPUzeU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3obig1XeOlw

That said, the spymaster should have a covert holding to build, although you shouldn't need it in order to do any spying. First, because having a spy agency full of clerk-assassins is cool, and second because everyone should get buildings if anyone does. Likewise you can do wizarding without a tower...

I tend to think they should differ only at high-level, optional specializations. At lower development levels, in most historical contexts, distinctions between public and private finance and administration don't really exist. So once you have a town hall (which is also a guild hall), maybe you have ...

I remember this part of the novels. I recall that Raistlin was somehow concerned that he was simply repeating the stuff that Fistandantilus did, but not that it was impossible to change the past.

https://dragonlance.fandom.com/wiki/Fistandantilus

PSA = prostate-specific antigen, not public service announcement :). Gamma-glutamyltransferase gets into your blood when cells turnover - most often these are liver cells, but prostate cell turnover (which also releases PSA) dumps GGT into the blood as well. If you're curious about all the tissues t...

So, lets say you were making a game where people played vampires who deal with supernatural politics. Well, of course Frank did. Does such a game want an expansion about sins ? Darn-tootin' it does. But, what do you want in that expansion? Category of Sins Do you want Fluff? Do you want Crunch? Per...

I think the discussion about celestial economics is more interesting. Once you've devoted time to giving players the ability to build irrigation improvements, you might want to obviate that ability entirely at the next tier (in the same sense that lockpicking is basically irrelevant at some point.) ...

Okay, I'm not sure how big a disagreement this really is. Certainly, a party of 3rd level characters could join a mercenary band, or all go work on a farm together for a summer, and I suppose it's better if they take generic peon actions during the strategic turns than if the game engine returns div...

Good design is hard . Let's suppose that we have a good set of tier 2 rules. Crow has a magic shop, Icy runs an inn, the Stranger has a platoon of hillmen warriors and Elvis has a criminal gang. They go on adventures where they call upon these resources, and they also take strategic turns where they...

On the one hand, I love Grek's table, but let me push back on my strict level gating. (I'll let Frank respond to Chamomile's comment if he wants). Simple argument - if player #2 wants to stay home and be a rune fang merchant, then he's going to do that and players #1, 3 and 4 are going adventuring i...

You might view this as a bit of a kludge, but it's needed to maintain the ensemble cooperative aspects of a tabletop RPG. It's a hero's journey, which means "secretly, is the avatar of Lord Ao" is a perfectly acceptable flavor of chosen one, and a fine character concept for a first level W...

Foxwarrior raises a legitimate point, but let's unpack it. Presumably there are hereditary princes who govern hexes. It seriously strains credibility if every six year old with a regent is an 11th level Fighter 5/Shadow Blade 5/Warmaster 1. The player characters may even be such princelings at first...

In actual play, you'd be zooming out , and I think the game needs to be built from the bottom-up in that way for this to work. So for tiers, you have: - Tier 1, in which you are murder-hobos. This is roughly D&D levels 1-5. - Tier 2, in which you have flunkies. This means you can run a farm, or ...

The tiers need to overlap. So if you have 30 guys on each side, you need to be able to resolve the battle as either a skirmish or as an engagement and the rules need to give roughly the same result either way. So, perhaps counter-intuitively, if you are engaged in distributed gang warfare ( https://...

There needs to be a scale transition where you care about having 40 or 70 tiny men with spears, to where you only care how many zounds you have. I'm not sure how it should work mechanically, but in a tabletop RPG you can't be deciding how to split patrol duties among 75 platoons of kobold spearmen, ...

JRPGs and MMORPGs have established a particularly bad precedent. These games have complicated soak formulas and also exponential growth in hit points. This works at all because it's all done in software, but in FFVII, is +10 Def better than +150 hit points? The math is needlessly complicated ( https...

Kaelik and Frank have both floated hybrid systems of Shadowrun's condition monitor and D&D 3rd edition's status effects. With quibbles about implementation and the number of damage tracks you want to keep, I would use such a system as well. For what it's worth, I would also use ten boxes to trac...

Economists may very well argue that slavery is inherently low-productivity (for whatever explanations), because many economists, especially of the Austrian school, are pathetically ignorant of econometrics or economic history. https://wolfweb.unr.edu/homepage/t_oleson/echist/slavery2.html 4. Slave a...

AC0 is a self-caricature, but as a tweenager I volunteered for Bill Weld's (Republican) candidacy as governor of MA, so I do know some libertarians who don't blend into the alt-right or Trumpism, and they are an intellectually interesting bunch - unlike AC0 whose bigotry makes him easy to dismiss. I...

Boy, it's hard to see "secretly is the princess" as anything other than a complication which pays off at higher levels - and those are doubleplus ungood. The "obvious" (but ++ungood) way for this to work is, at 5th level you discover you are secretly princess of the Rohannim, and...

The observable universe only contains about 10^80 electrons. You're wasting a lot of them. FACT: Libertarian screeds always grow exponentially and become more nonsensical, because they "win arguments" by exhausting your patience and getting you to walk away. https://i.imgur.com/D6irS3A.png...