The Gaming Den

It's not about wanting a space adventure and trying to find a setting to run it in. I'm more than capable of doing that. I want to write something that allows people's Shadowrun games to have a space session in it, where Mr Johnson comes to them and says, "Guys, we want you to abduct this dude ...

It's this image, but I can't find a card. All I can find is someone's character sheet for a duellist called Kakita Hayate which uses the image. http://philgamer.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/capture.jpg Edit: I never played Vampire: the Eternal Struggle, but I recognise that piece of art from that car...

The leftmost one is a Legend of the Five Rings Diamond Edition character card.

Edit: I notice after writing that that Akiosama pointed that out. My bad.

Chem weapons would probably get lots of horrible glares because you're in a sealed environment with recirculated air, so it would be very difficult to *ever* get that stuff out of the atmosphere. I'm imagining that large orbitals would have fairly sturdy sides because of the possibility of micromete...

What you've mentioned, momo, is is more an expression of the fact that a certain level of doublethink and hypocrisy is necessary to survive in an imperfect world. It is hypocritical to act against one's sincerely held beliefs, but we all do it every day anyway. That's the sensible thing to do. I use...

I don't have my books convenient to me, someone advise me: does Background Count apply to the place you're casting from or the place you're casting to? If (to take a non-random example) you're casting a spell from HEO which is aimed via an optical mirrored telescope onto the ground, would you take t...

You can't dually believe in Santa Claus as a magical present bearer and also realize it's not possible and doesn't exist as such. Once you get to the second half you have rejected the first. You miss my point. We live in a culture of hypocrisy where the word "believe" is concerned. People...

So my friend E. recently asked me to consult on a game she's running. It's going to be Star Trek style space opera for the most part, but she wants to get the space science as close to right as possible except in cases where they have to resort to outright fiction to get the genre conventions to wor...

PRAK PRAAAK GOD DAMNIT PRAK PRAK GOD DAMNIT IN WHAT SENSE DOES SOMEONE LEAN ANARCHOCOMMUNIST BY DOING THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF ANARCHOCOMMMUNISM IN WHAT SENSE DOES SOMEONE BELIEVE IN ANARCHOCOMMUNISM BY BELIEVING ANARCHOCOMMUNISM IS FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE IN WHAT SENSE IS IT CORRECT TO IDENTIFY AS ANARCHO...

The stuff on those two museum pictures looks to me like splint, which is possibly the only thing more pain-in-the-ass to maintain than chain. This suggests that the maintenance difficulty isn't the issue here: it's probably going to be more an expenses matter. But yeah, I agree that lamellar and bri...

I think you hit the nail on the head, FatR: Exalted can't be changed because it's marketed at its own fans. People know what Exalted is by now and they're either going to buy it because they like that, or not buy it because they don't like that. There's relatively little room for new design work the...

I don't know where you draw the line between expense/maintenance vs terrain related factors with the Mongols. Those guys liked to travel fast and took a shit ton of horses with them. Acquiring a few new leather bits to lace into your damaged vest is going to be trivial compared to fucking around wi...

I haven't played the children's game (indeed, I didn't know about it until just now) but Dominion is a fantastic game. I highly recommend it.

That sucks, Koumei. Best wishes to the guy; he sounds like a pretty tough old dude. My grandfather was the same and his last years were difficult because he had to come to terms with his own frailty, which is a thing he spent his life denying. I hope that if the worst happens, it's at least quick an...

I used to volunteer in a charity shop. About fifty percent of what people donate is simply chucked out as unsaleable. It's done quietly so as not to offend the donors but I don't think they care that much: a lot of people treat "donate it" as being exactly like "chuck it out" but...

Polish and Hungarian aristocrats were pretty enthusiastic about keeping up with western weapons tech during the medieval era. Individual lords would import horses and armour from Spain and Italy if need be. The non-aristocratic people didn't have as much, but then that's generally true of most thing...

Realising that your stated beliefs are bullshit is a good first step. It's a necessary first step. The next step is to find out what your actual beliefs are, and you can do this by examining cases and listening to your instinctive revulsion towards or support of various outcomes. For example, examin...

Oh yeah, and the tower conjured by Conjuring the Mystic Tower is enormous. Even with thick walls, each floor is large enough for a Hermetic lab and some living space. You could fit all six wizards into it with enough space left over for a library and common room, and then two floors underground for ...

Conjuring the Mystic Tower will create a tower that is platonically perfect, as Jeanpat notes. It's equivalent to rolling an infinity on your Finesse roll using The Changeable Tower. It's much better and more stable and stronger and stuff; the question is whether you feel that that's worth paying 7 ...

Dark Heresy basically had CoC's sanity mechanic, though I felt that it handled things better. Chaos shit had terror ratings 1-3 generally speaking that inflicted sanity damage, and you could accumulate PTSD sanity damage as well. While the symptoms of rampaging insanity in the game were pretty much...

May as well see what they're doing.

From my experience, there's three very different things in CoC which can all be called "insanity." Only two of them involve the SAN characteristic. A) Direct neurological damage, the sort that comes from seeing Cthulhu rise from his watery grave. B) PTSD based on horrible experiences. C) P...

Rationalwiki's love of Goats is a terrifying thing.

After reading AH's eloquent nerdrage on the topic of bad Lovecraft pseudoscholarship, and Frank's eloquent nerdrage on the misuse of real-life medicine, I'm inclined to say that we're done here. Not on this OSSR, but on OSSRs in general. We will never have another example of people nerdraging this h...