The Gaming Den

New Vegas has both Karma and Reputation. The thing about the karma is that you will gain karma for actions that are pretty much non-optional: such as killing always hostile enemies like Feral ghouls, certain gang members and Fiends. meanwhile losing karma for killing 'good' characters is faction dep...

Really skill checks (and skills that cost character resources) should be limited to shit that has opposition and/or is risky. Climbing walls the hard way, hiding, finding ambushes, significant diplomancy (persuade/force the (level appropriate) bandits to back down, not get a 5% discount at the shop...

But sure, let me put it another way- a combat music ability should have some sort of roll, even if it's a save by the target. But someone who can deal any level of mindfuckery through music shouldn't be pestered with bullshit rolls for mundane tasks at any time. Hero to Zero on mundane bullshit is ...

Maxus wrote: It does make me wonder why they've never done a movie on this guy. Hell, a video game would be awesome, too. Although possibly that's what playing the Witch Hunter in Vermintide is for.

They actually made a movie version in 2009, though it wasn't exactly a big time production.

Somewhat relevant to previous posts: I went and saw the live action Ghost in the Shell (because my girlfriend has strong feelings for the franchise). Notably, I did so after re-watching the original less than twenty-four hours before. The new film is...not compelling. There are some cool visuals in ...

On the other hand, the Cora or Liam romances are a huge creepy problem, since they're directly your subordinates. Suvi is problematic, since while she doesn't directly answer to you, she serves on your ship. Vetra is an independent who answers to Kesh, but is pretty much there for her own reasons (...

Heh. Vetra's isn't explicit. Not surprising since Turians have a goddamn metal carapace (and can't even eat the same food), but they didn't even try. Shame, really, because by the end I was curious as to how the mechanics work- the upper body is obviously a no go, but I'm not sure how far that meta...

Of course, I actually find the pacing of the Marvel Netflix shows to be fucking awful. I still haven't finished Luke Cage. It's not that I don't like it, it's that the pacing is really bad and hard to justify setting aside blocks of time to watch more of it. And I just plain lost interest in Darede...

A lot of the criticism I've seen of the game is along the lines of "You go to a totally new galaxy, and you could encounter anything, but you just find humanoid aliens with guns; that's so boring." Did you not have an issue with that? It's a space fantasy - in space fantasy you encounter ...

So, I've just finished Mass Effect: Andromeda, and these seems as good a place to talk about it as any. First things first, I need to talk about the bugs and get that out of the way. Yes, Bioware didn't quite get the game finished before release. There are some problems, and the animations are borke...

Half a mile seems like a lot. From a single point that gives you a search area of ~0.8 square miles. Population densities in the heavily settled parts of Greater Boston are quite high , with much of the metro core above 10,000 people per square mile, and the densest areas several times that. For exa...

Void Wings doesn't seem to work the way you are hoping. It sounds like it just adds the base speed each round in the example (i.e you retain your old velocity, but add your base velocity as acceleration), so not exponential... except that they do imply relativistic speeds. It would take much longer...

It's not that those shows don't mean anything, it's that they demonstrably didn't need the V:TM intellectual property to succeed. At the end of the day vampires are public domain whether you want to make The Strain , True Blood , Twilight or fucking Blacula . In this world of Comicon panels and int...

Look, The Vampire Diaries , which is soap-ified version of what VtM (and to an extent the entire oWoD, it has werewolves and mages too) always wanted to be has gone 8 fucking seasons with no signs of stopping and managed to spawn The Originals as a multi-season spin-off. Both series have drunk deep ...

The 3.5 skill list is 33 skills, plus 10 knowledge skills, plus craft (x) and profession (x) and asks you to pay skill points for speak language. That's too many, even a party of nothing but rogues can't keep up. The Pathfinder skill list is only 23 skills, plus 10 knowledge skills, plus craft (x) a...

There is, since the RNG is a single d20 and units cap at 400. What half-assed justification do they provide for capping unit size at an understrength battalion? Even a Roman cohort had more guys than that, and a cohort was a pretty small unit in terms of battlefield deployment. I get that the histo...

The economics of asteroid mining depend on a lot of factors, and the value of the metals (or whatever other compounds you might be extracting) and the cost of mining may not be even in the top ten as most important. When comparing with the Earth-equivalent industry you have to think about the whole ...

Ideally the developers would have an expected power curve. Deviating from that too much will upset your encounter design (and mention player enjoyment), and since you've sold a bunch of adventures to your customers that is a problem. Too little power is bad design but is somewhat self-healing. Play...

In interesting news on this topic there's the discovery of the TRAPPIST system . That's a system with seven Earth-sized planets and three potentially habitable ones. Critically though, all of the seven planets are at orbital distances from 0.011 AU to 0.06 AU. That's seven systems crammed into a spa...

While I have not see The Great Wall yet, I find it hilarious that the film is nominally set during the Song Dynasty, when the Great Wall itself did not exist in anything resembling its current form as pictured in the film (in fact it may not have existed at all, earlier structures having collapsed) ...

So... lasers. The playtest video shows off laser pistols in all their 'glory.' First by goblins firing at the party with bodged, jury rigged pieces of shit that did d4 points of damage. This seemed odd, but fine. Except the party also fired back with laser pistols that also did 1d4(+0) points of da...

Searching online, I can't find any discussions of peoples' Star Wars SAGA homebrew material from 2017 or even 2016. I just don't think there's a meaningful fanbase waiting for this thing. Well, it is important to remember that Disney's taking an axe to the EU had a real impact on the utility of old...

The issue here is that the space craft and the mining colony are incredibly costly items from a capital expenditure perspective. Fishing boats used by slavers by contrast are often cheap hand-me-downs. Any reasonable business seriously trying to exploit resources elsewhere in the Solar System isn't...

Lately I've been hearing people say "Vader and Obi Wan was MEANT to be a clumsy fight, it's an old man and a cripple with a purposefully uncomfortable suit!" I mean the honest answer at the time was the 1st Star Wars movie didn't have a dedicated fight choreographer and the suit was diffi...

Are there resources we know about found in the asteroid belt but not found on the moon or mars? I figure it'd be easier to build a permanent mining colony there than fly all the way to the belt. The key to asteroid mining is gravity, you want to avoid gravity wells because that's the big limitation...