The Gaming Den

Radiation flow after the bombs is interesting too. It follows prevailing winds and basically rains down on the first mountains it meets in that direction. Around Chernobyl the worst fallout was on the near sides of the downwind mountains. And it's spotty as, depending on where it actually rained hea...

The thing about 600 kT warheads launched from Subs, is they have about three times the radius of effect of the Little Boy / Fat Man bombs dropped on Japan. That's nine times the area. But they can't hit anything mobile, so, they just erase entire cities. Which is why they're that big and not bigger,...

So, midterms are gunna be, like, Dems again. By the look of it. Mostly off the back of that Republican thing where they say and do things they know are wrong just because it pisses off the Democrats, like, you know, not wearing a mask or not getting vaccinated against deadly pandemics. Because that'...

Oh, right, can only fire and appoint the guys who could fire and appoint the guy, fair enough. Seems like defending the post office, when they need those votes to keep fascism at bay a little longer, would be a smart thing to do, but ah well. The vaccine thing is just weird. India makes a lot of the...

I saw a weird thing about people Biden won't fire, and it was someone cheering because he'd got a few confirmations through and it meant he could now fire someone, and ... that's not how that works. Like, forever, if someone was a useless hack, they'd be fired by new admin and a temporary head would...

Also just plain gamist inventions like the Gelatinous Cube and company is the reason the stacks of corpses and their kit vanish between dungeon expeditions, and it's invisible because that's why you didn't see it on the way out. I absolutely love that. I never thought of that and think that's reall...

D&D is the most popular because it's the best RPG, by a fucking mile, for most of it's life. Not 4e, obviously, but the rest of them, like, Pathfinder got worse the more the diverged from 3e, but while it was still basically 3e D&D it was best too. You can argue 2nd edition AD&D was a wo...

There's also the original Appendix N in 1st edition. Inspiration for all of the fantasy work I have done stems directly from the love my father showed when I was a lad, for he spent many hours telling me stories he made up as he went along, tales of cloaked old men who could grant wishes, of magic r...

For me, Mild Autisom, mostly ADHD. Which, mostly it turns out everyone's been under-diagnosing ADHD forever. "Things are never that big." ADHD commonly comes with this ... thing called Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, where it's fucking hard work to not perceive every little side glace as ...

It's normal to spend the day in a daze when over-sleeping. It's normal to over-sleep if you go long stretches of being woken by an alarm. It's normal to need woken by an alarm if you don't take time to wind down and go to sleep before you get very tired each day. [hr] Vaccinations work when the expe...

The future seems like a place with no more fossil fuels used at all and obviously solar power and any form of storage (including neat stuff like heat in salt), plus a little bit of biofuels for awkward stuff like farm machinery and ocean-going ships. That's the future, at some point. The energy rate...

Given a heartbreaker close enough to 3e that "class feature vs. spell" is a meaningful distinction, the only real differences between a Turn Undead class feature powered by its own separate resource and a turn undead spell-that's-not-a-spell powered by its own separate resource is that th...

Just a casual vote against death spirals in RPGs involving characters doing things that would trigger them. Unless it's supposed to be a form of avoidable game ending fail state, and even then. It's just that people keep wanting to do it, and it's not even particularly realistic for people plus adre...

2) Multiple resources. The nice thing about having Turn Undead and Wild Shape as class features instead of spells is that they come out of separate pools from your spells, so (A) you don't have to choose between the two, not even to the extent that a cleric or druid has to choose whether to sacrifi...

With quibbling at the margins (leadership, for example, or general fightiness), [skills should not scale with level]. In a level-based system, you get whole new tiers of power, and at those higher tiers, skills don't scale, they expire . Efforts to maintain the relevance of lockpicking are the most...

Challenging otherwise stable theories is how they get better. Quantum theory took decades to get anywhere, and did so because brilliant people kept challenging it until, basically, people ran out of ideas about how to challenge it that were falsifiable and had a mechanism for action. -- Anyway, it's...

I do not know how Tussock got Ebberron so wrong. The setting is explictly a 1920s/1930s situtation where the last war ended because everybody got scared shitless of being killed by the growing number of magic super weapons and all the factions feel like they would have won with just one more offens...

The idea of referencing 1000 actions, that might in turn reference further actions, to get every fucking thing in the game done is a literal nightmare. Have none of you seen people stall out trying to choose which spell to cast from their list of 20 prepared spells? That's two layer chunking they st...

So Greyhawk is best for historical interest, like the fact Gygax did not think it possible to publish Castle Greyhawk because his megadungeon was way too fucking big for an actual book. Almost everything about it tells you stuff about why the game got like it did. Because of Living Greyhawk, there's...

Did see that about an hour before the shoot down, fox was running some opinion dude who was shouting at the screen that the US was on it's way with B52s and that the mullahs had better find a cave to hide in RIGHT NOW because bombs and shit. Which, like, it's broadcast around the world, Iran heard t...

There was a shooting at an open-carry thing in the states, maybe last year, and the police said it was impossible to do anything at all because fucking everyone had guns and were all running away at the same time, and the people open-carrying said the same thing, you couldn't tell who the shooter wa...

The 2010's had me suffer from 10 years of ageing. Fortunately, did not die from it. Widely under-rated, is aging. Same happened to me, and am hoping for the same again in the 2020's. Avoided a few 4e games, acted as a sounding post for people's complaints about the 4e games they played in. Read a w...

2nd edition Chaotic Neutral. Where, on coming to a bridge, a CN character might just swim across the river instead, because Zeb Cook was a horrible person who hated classic free thinkers. People would play characters and try to think up inanely stupid ways to respond to any fucking stimulus whatsoev...

5e monsters are giant sacks of HP compared to 3.x And weren't 3e monsters also giant sacks of HP, compared to 1e/2e monsters? Well. I have studied this particular topic. Most 3e monsters weren't, Dragons and Giants were, when compared to what PC damage output could do. Gygax in OD&D set up figh...

Yup, should've said in there somewhere, just using the attack dice to save a roll, only way to get enough pushes going at early levels, and it lets everyone play the positioning game rather than just the specialists. I feel like this is the sort of thing 4e was trying to be, at least in the marketin...