The Gaming Den

Goblin culture is Capitalist and awful Goblin culture in fantasy games is a Capitalist Fascist racial empire. The Goblins are mean, racist, bigoted, cruel, insecure, diseased, and warlike. Their leaders are bloated gluttonous monsters constantly calling for prisoners to be hauled before them. Conce...

Is the consequences of doing good an example of considerations for adventure design or general GM's advice? Obviously to some degree it's both but its true secret purpose is as a guideline to create rich roleplaying with NPC's. It's pretty normal in adventures to have the NPC's the players interact...

Doing Good Has Consequences When you defeat evil there should be consequences. This seems counterintuitive but is true. If your party frees all the oppressed Orcs forced to work the Shadow King’s fields they’ve done an unquestionable moral good. They have also probably made it so that there’s going...

I've been writing a lot of rpg stuff during the quar, I figured I'd start posting the system-agnostic stuff and anyone else doing any rambley quar writings is welcomed to do the same. Humans and Half-Humans Humans “thing” should be their fertility. Humans can have kids with anything. Orcs and Elves ...

Something like "Combat Zones" and areas where things are so lawless that no response is coming for anything less than heavy ordinance would help square those two circles though. I think the pink mohawk crew would be willing to wear hats specially made to keep their badass hair secret until...

Shadowrun's fascination with body modification and internal upgrades posit a setting massively more focused around stealth than Shadowrun is. If the assumption was that the dramatic majority of jobs were done in locations you couldn't even bring a pistol without being caught then suddenly being the ...

Hey if anyone else posts a nice sentence or two I can use to pad my resume I’ll post my absurd Professional DM headshots I’m using both as my business ones for a gaming channel and this one cool drunk dnd job

Help me live the perfect life friends. I’ll post bad pictures in repayment.

Dean should play with us more. I absolutely WILL play with you more! I'm in the middle of writing and filming two different projects at the moment and I've got a couple comedy shows to do a week so I feel really compressed for time. In a month stuff will calm down as one of those projects finishes....

There's literally no way they'll have any clue who you are. They're not game designers or D&D people they're theatre people who want a D&D show. I just want to show that I'm the guy with the D&D pedigree.

So I'm interviewing for this new show that's opening in New York that's got a live dungeon master and you're running a sort of D&D with some audience participation all the while leading the occasional drinking game and so on. They'll get a lot of New York City actor performer types interviewing ...

Spellsword

Yeah American circumcision is and should go the way of the dodo. Even if any of us happen to be cut it still doesn't mean this stupid weird and frankly perverse practice should continue. Pretty much anyone looking at a practice started by an old awful pervert who pumped yogurt into boys asses and wa...

That's kind of cool. Making your troop output determined by what society you choose. So "Democracy" gets you tons of hoplites and a "Slaves/Nobles" societal order gets you mostly shitty Helots but a small amount of spartan supersoldiers. Obviously you can then get griffins on top...

I think what you want there is “Reputation”. So killing a dragon can gain you reputation but so can being a city with great philosophers and artists. It mixes the idea of being known at all with being known for good things.

I would allow the possibility that someone would want their karma at a continuously pooling rate for games that have less of a sense of the particulars of time. I think a lot of games still have the 2nd edition vibe where it's been "a month or so" since your last adventure and making a sim...

Chapo Traphouse in general is a good podcast because it is the only comedy source that jokes about politics the way you do in real life. They sound like me and my friends when we talk shit about the world except funnier, rather than the awful endless whingeing Daily Show-esque centrist "woke&qu...

I wanted something discrete, a la the five-dot model of Vampire paths, but I wanted the powers to build off each other and involve fixed cost formulas and effects a la Shadowrun. In a better world, I probably would have double-downed on the Shadowrun aspect and just had a system where you can desig...

Are there any GURPS books that are known to be good? A good gurps book is useable for just about any system as inspiration so I thought I would look at whichever ones are supposed to be the best Gurps books.

The latest Chapo episode from the Iowa Caucus may be the single greatest podcast recording ever made. I've never felt more seen by a piece of media. That shit was a powerful powerful episode. If anyone wants to listen; it's wild good https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/390-live-from-iowa-city-so...

Would a Pokemon Monster Manual (a Pokedex, if you would) benefit from having writeups of each individual species (or species line) that detail their diets, habitats, and behaviors? Or is that too much work for too little payoff and you're better off referring people to the internet? Basically, is i...

A thing the entire new series (and the prequels) fundamentally lack is the concept of character development. No character changes over time in any movie. Sometimes they kind of become technically different things by gaining group affiliations or powers but as humans and characters everyone is exactl...

I feel like you'd have to freeze water super super fast to harm a lock. I could be wrong. But like if I leave a bottle of water in the freezer it explodes if its closed not open, plus being made of metal and all.

What do you think cold damage, like a frost beam or area of crazy cold would do narratively or mechanically if it wasn't just d6's of damage? What can cold do in approximately 10 seconds to a human being?

Frank. One thing I thought would be valuable to hear from you specifically would be how you think Cold/Extreme Cold should be done in terms of gradients of significance and what the effects are. Heat too while I'm asking I suppose. How much cold does it take to fuck up a person over how long? How wo...

Hey Kaelik I generally like how Fortresses and Fiends does damage/wounds but my eyes glaze over a bit when I try to parse the actual numbers in your system. Do you think you could write out an example of two people hitting each other in your system? Not a whole combat, just the numbers involved in t...