The Gaming Den

You just aren't going to be able to do the Red Dog Mine strategy of having people work for 4 weeks and then send them back to Anchorage to spend some weeks in a city of 300,000+ people to work out their loneliness and lack of blow jobs. Or if you can , then transportation across the solar system is...

If you are going to put working people two hundred and ninety thousand times as far away from a Nevada brothel than it is possible for any point on planet Earth to be, you're going to have to bring the whores to them. And their families, and teachers for their children, and cooks for their restaura...

GMs who roll everything behind their screen are almost certainly cheating all the time. We have an "open roll policy" at our table, where everything always has to be visible to everyone else. It works out fine. Sure, after a few rolls players can determine how good the monster is at saves...

Terrain and wind are the big deciders in how a wildfire behaves. Temperatures and humidity help influence volatility. I'm playing with some ideas on how all this would work together. The original idea was something like Battlelore/Memoir '44/Command & Colors where you use terrain hexes on a mast...

Red_Rob wrote:I'd read a short story collection in this setting.

I've been listening to a lot of fiction serial podcasts and it seems like Doubt would be a great concept for a podcast/light ARG.

It sounds to me like the killer for Netrunner was that it used the CCG model to begin with. FFG seems to be doing the right thing with the LCG set distro model with their version. Also if memory serves FFG is introducing factions and different flavors of runners and corps to create a metagame. I nev...

Understood about the bookkeeping. The problem is that one and done is that it doesn't represent a large part about what makes fire dangerous. The other problem with burning until it gets put out is that not only is that not how most fires of any real size are put out, but it deprives the player of t...

So I'm playing with an idea for a boardgame (sort of a single player strategy game) about wildfire management, and I'm trying to work out a way to mimic the spread of wildfire across a map in a reasonably realistic way that does not feel time consuming. I'm looking for feedback on this or alternate ...

I can't remember if I still have my Rifts decks or not. I might have given them away or tossed them finally a move or two ago. If memory serves that game was bananas. It started out feeling kind of like a Magic ripoff and then escalated into glass cannon territory with gargantuan power curves that c...

Oh man Chartmaster System! I think we tried to play MERP *once*. It didn't go well. In fact it went terrible. I loved me some Middle Earth, and that's what sold me on this. I didn't learn that a beloved fiction setting doesn't necessarily make for a great RPG setting. This is obvious because I bough...

Interesting.

You're right there needs to be choices. I need to mull on this for a while.

I also just got my copy of The Cure. Going to play a few rounds of it to see how it plays out this weekend.

It could be simple. Each side rolls their dice pool. Matches cancel each other out. Dice that remain are successes. It almost seems like it's predetermined even in that situation though as to who has the higher dice pool. That sounds like a problem, especially if we want to represent the party figh...

@TheFlatline: I am kind of boycotting FFG because Star Wars: Armada was a thing that happened. (Note to any FFG marketing goons reading this: three capital ships does not an armada make, fucktards, I want my 140 dollars back.) So I mainly just wanted to express my unchecked envy of your username . ...

I'd rather see a discussion of rpgs that are mechanically shit and should have been better. I have a vague memory of the circa-2003? Star Trek RPG where starting characters generally couldn't regularly succeed on basic tasks. Dice pool system, and starting characters had 4-5 dice and target numbers...

Splitting the party could create separate threat pools. That would seem to be disincentive enough, because you wouldn't be able to use spare 3s in your pool to cancel a superfluidity of 3s in another group's threat pool. That means that it could end up being really hard to eliminate each group of t...

Also I can't take credit for the system since Frank literally pulled the core idea out of his ass while commenting on TEOTW. True, but you can totally still design the game with a thanks or props to him in mind, even if you're a making shoddy profit from it (if at all). Regardless, thanks again Fra...

Small thought I had while reading all the ideas (I would pay money for a polished version of this, btw) Party size seems like it should be important, mostly because it seems "in genre" (split the party or all stay together?). Maybe some kind of "noticeability" mechanic, where ea...

I feel like there's room for "use d6s and cancel numbers that match, 1 and 2 are environmental, 3 and 4 are zombies, 5 and 6 are equipment" as base while also letting you potentially make fancy dice with, like, a raindrop, a lightning bolt, a clawed hand, some teeth, a flashlight, and a g...

The core idea is that you cancel dice with dice that have exactly the number. So if the threat level drops low, you can end up with a lot of blank dice that don't match anything and can at best be used for minor benefits. One game I've been playing a bit of lately is Pandemic: The Cure, which is pr...

The thread which would not die. So, this is actually a really interesting idea that I'd take and run with but for not exactly being able to parse the system idea entirely. Or rather, I mostly get it, but I'm not entirely clear on the threat cancelling idea. Is it still a dicepool res. system, and y...

FFG's Star Wars dice don't accomplish anything that a regular old dicepool system couldn't do. Not a dicepool with different shaped dice like you're proposing here, but just a standard Shadowrun pile of six-siders. It's a failed experiment that they shipped anyway, probably to sell the dice. It was...

Zoloft's Depressing Lantern- When produced it lights up a 30' diameter circle of things not worth looking at/are of no interest. The Rucksack/belt pouch of the everlasting cookie- The first item drawn out of this container is always a warm, fresh, chocolate chip cookie. Afterwards, characters have 1...

The basic problem isn't, generally, the setting. The setting is pretty fine, so long as you buy into 40k to start with (and if you don't, why the fuck would you play DH or any of the others anyway?). No, the problems are primarily in the system. Actually the 40k setting is such a sprawling clusterf...

If nothing else, this opens the way for a possible new 40k RPG that doesn't have terrible mechanics. I'm not saying it's likely, mind you; just noting the possibility. 1. Your naivete is refreshingly sweet. 2. The Dark Heresy engine was created by GW's Black Library. So instead the line is going ba...

Grek wrote:Someone explain to me what stops a vampire from just eating a non-cooperative animal.

An entire cow has like... 2 blood points in them since they're not human.

If you think that a vampire leaves a pile of corpses behind, wait until you have to start eating animals.